disorderly conduct statute under which Martin was charged was unconstitutional on its face. The judge ruled that the statute infringed upon the first amendment rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution, that the statute was overbroad and void for vagueness. The state appealed to the superior court which affirmed the trial court's ruling. The state now appeals from these two lower court decisions.
The statute here called into question was enacted by the 1973 Alaska Legislature which amended and substantially changed the prior AS 11.45.030. The new statute followed our decision in Marks v. City of Anchorage, 500 P.2d 644 (Alaska 1972), which struck down the disorderly conduct ordinance of the City of Anchorage. The Anchorage ordinance prohibited tumultuous behavior, unreasonable noise, offensively coarse utterances, gestures or displays, and abusive language when such activity was intended to cause or recklessly created a risk of causing public inconvenience, annoyance or alarm.[2] The language of the ordinance constituted a substantial impediment to the exercise of free speech and thus infringed upon first amendment rights. For this reason we held the ordinance to be overbroad. Moreover, we found that the ordinance failed to clearly specify the contours of the prohibited conduct and therefore was void for vagueness.[3]
Marks rested on a number of well-established authorities, several of which antedated our decision by several decades. In Terminiello v. City of Chicago, 337 U.S. 1, 69 S.Ct. 894, 93 L.Ed. 1131 (1949), the United States Supreme Court held unconstitutional a breach of peace ordinance as applied to an individual accused of delivering an inflammatory speech to an unruly crowd. After first noting that free discussions are essential to the vitality of our civil and political institutions, the Supreme Court stated:
[A] function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purpose when it induces a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfactio