Legal philosophy
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Hate, Dignity, and Law
For those who are not yet sick and tired of my expostulations on the subject, I venture some concluding thoughts on the criminalization of hate speech, and on Jeremy Waldron’s argument in support of such criminalization. My previous posts on the topic are here, here, here, and here. Prof. Waldron argues that hate speech must… Continue reading
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Offence and Defence
I come to the third and final part of my comment on Jeremy Waldron’s case for criminalizing hate speech, The Harm in Hate Speech, a book that extends the Holmes Lectures he delivered at Harvard a few years ago. I addressed his attempt to define hate speech as group libel here, concluding that it was not successful. I… Continue reading
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Hate and Disagreement
This is the second part of my comment on Jeremy Waldron’s case for criminalizing hate speech, The Harm in Hate Speech. I addressed his attempt to define hate speech as group libel here. That attempt was not successful, I concluded, but that need not mean that we should not be criminalizing hate speech, regardless of… Continue reading
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Hate Speech and Group Libel
As I promised yesterday, I want to share a few thoughts on some arguments that Jeremy Waldron makes in The Harm in Hate Speech, his book making the case for criminalizing hate speech. (Prof. Waldron’s Holmes Lectures, from which the book grew, were published in the Harvard Law review, and are available here.) I will address… Continue reading
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The Rear-Guard of Hatred
I am reading parts of Jeremy Waldron’s book on The Harm in Hate Speech, in which he argues that hate speech can and should be criminalized to uphold the dignity of all the members of society. I will have more detailed thoughts on it later, probably tomorrow. But for now, just an observation that has… Continue reading
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Judicial Independence, Freedom, and Duty
Judicial independence is a familiar idea, though it is also a difficult one, in more than one sense. Difficult to accept, on the one hand, because independence from political, and ultimately electoral, control seats uneasily with our notions of democracy in which political power (which judges exercise, since they make their decisions in the name… Continue reading
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The Confusion in Hate Speech
The Alberta Court of Appeal delivered an interesting decision on the meaning and application of prohibition on “hate speech” in the province’s human rights legislation. The case, Lund v. Boissoin, 2012 ABCA 300, concerned the publication in a Red Deer newspaper of a letter to the editor urging citizens to resist “the homosexual agenda”, and… Continue reading
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Almost Arbitrary
On the Volokh Conspiracy blog, Eugene Volokh has a post about an interesting case just decided by a federal district court in California. The case, Hebrew University of Jerusalem v. General Motors LLC, concerns GM’s right to use the image of Albert Einstein if an advertisement for one of its gas-guzzlers. Einstein died in 1955… Continue reading
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Right Answer Romantics
I was re-reading F.A. Hayek’s discussion of the common law in Chapters 4 and 5 of Rules and Order, the first volume of his Law, Legislation and Liberty, and was struck by something I had missed when I first read it four years ago while working on a thesis on common-law constitutionalism. When deciding a case… Continue reading
Double Aspect 