Saving Free Speech...from Itself
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- 3,99 $
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- 3,99 $
Description de l’éditeur
In an era of political correctness, race-baiting, terrorist incitement, the ‘Danish’ cartoons, the shouting down of speakers, and, of course, ‘fake news,’ liberals and conservatives are up in arms both about speech and its excesses, and what the First Amendment means. Speech has been weaponized. Everyone knows it, but no one seems to know how to make sense of the current confusion, and what to do about it. Thane Rosenbaum’s provocative and compelling book is what is needed to understand this important issue at the heart of our society and politics.
Our nation’s founders did not envision speech as a license to trample on the rights of others. And the Supreme Court has decided cases where certain categories of speech are already prohibited without violating the Constitution. Laws banning hate speech are prevalent in other democratic, liberal societies, where speech is not valued above human dignity, and yet in Germany, France, the UK and elsewhere, life continues, freedoms have not rolled to the bottom of the bogeyman of a ‘slippery slope,’ and democracies remain vibrant. There is already a great deal of second guessing about the limits of free speech. In 1977, courts permitted neo-Nazis to march in a Chicago suburb populated by Holocaust survivors. Today, many wonder whether the alt-right should have been prevented from marching in Charlottesville in 2017. Even the ACLU, which represented both groups, is having doubts as to whether the First Amendment should override basic notions of equality and citizenship.
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In this somewhat convoluted treatise, Touro College law professor Rosenbaum (Payback: The Case for Revenge) argues that certain limits on free speech are not only constitutional and in line with previous case law, but are essential for the maintenance of civil society and personal dignity. Contrasting First Amendment absolutism with European statutes recognizing a right to dignity and criminalizing hateful and inciting speech, Rosenbaum asserts that the European model is more in line with what the founding fathers intended. His appeals to authority ("consider what George Washington would do"; an interpretation of Talmudic law that equates social humiliation with murder) are less effective than discussions grounded in law and science, including his arguments that not all speech rises to the level of an idea and that tort law should take into consideration neuroscientific evidence on the lasting impact of harassment on the human brain. Such valuable insights are obscured by overreaching claims ("Behind every free speech absolutist lurks a cyberspace bully and college campus censor"), however, and readers may struggle to square Rosenbaum's recognition that words can cause emotional damage with his disdain for political correctness on college campuses. In seeking to draw the line between what should be protected speech and what shouldn't, this less-than-persuasive account mainly succeeds in showing how complicated and tendentious such a process might become.
