Saving Free Speech...from Itself

Thane Rosenbaum

• Publisher: Fig Tree Books LLC
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780312199548
• eBook ISBN: 9781941493274
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Derechos humanos

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-rightshould 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.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Praise for Saving Free Speech . . . from Itself
• Also by Thane Rosenbaum
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Bret Stephens
• Introduction
• 1. Free Speech Reconsidered
• 2. American Outliers: Speech as Robust Right
• 3. Silenced Speech on the American College Campus
• 4. The General Public, and Keeping Your Mouth Shut
• 5. Free Speech May Be Less American than Football
• 6. Where it is Permissible to Say: Speak No More
• 7. What Is the Marketplace of Ideas?
• 8. Is Everything That Spills from the Mouth of a Speaker an Idea?
• 9. An Idea by Any Other Name
• 10. A Marketplace of Ideas for the Dumbfounded
• 11. What Is So Bad About the Regulation of Speech?
• 12. Speech That Is NON–SPEECH
• 13. Dignity by Right
• 14. Europe’s Focus on Privacy and Dignity Without Sacrificing Speech
• 15. Not Everything Should Be Open for Debate
• 16. Hate Leads to Violence
• 17. Where Dignity is Already Recognized—A Right to Privacy and Dignity
• 18. The Justices for Whom Dignity Always Mattered
• 19. Incivility and its Discontents
• 20. The Social Contract and Human Dignity
• 21. Tort Law to the Rescue of Dignity
• 22. Some Words, by “their very utterance,” Lose Their Free Speech Protections
• 23. “Sticks and Stones” Are Not the Only Cause of Serious Harm
• 24. Enter Science—Putting the Microscope to Wounding Words
• 25. The Physical and the Emotional: One and the Same in the Human Brain
• 26. First and Second Amendment Crazies
• 27. What Brain Scans Show and What Some Legal Decisions Say
• 28. The Mind’s Recall of Pain
• 29. The Consequences of Free Speech Taken Seriously
• 30. The Chaplinsky List and a Harm–Based Analysis
• 31. And Then the Supreme Court Got Even More Free Speech Crazy
• 32. Other Cases Where the Supreme Court Privileged Speech Over Pain
• 33. When Nazis in the United States Were Shown the Respect They Surely Did Not Deserve
• 34. Emotional Distress Claims Caused by Speech That Prevailed
• 35. When Cartoons Are Not Funny but Should Still Constitute Permissible Speech
• 36. Hate Speech is a Hate Crime
• 37. The Alternative Universe of the College Campus
• 38. The Right to Make a Bomb
• 39. Tolerating Skid Marks on the Slippery Slope
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Endnotes