Saving Free Speech.from Itself

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.

Thane Rosenbaum is an essayist, novelist, and law professor. His articles, reviews and essays appear frequently in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, CNN, the Daily Beast, and other national publications. He serves as the Legal Analyst for CBS News Radio and can be seen regularly on several able news shows. He moderates The Talk Show at the 92nd Street Y, an annual series on culture, world events, and politics. He has given public lectures around the world. He is a Distinguished University Professor at Touro College, where he directs the Forum on Life, Culture & Society. Rosenbaum is the author of Payback: The Case for Revenge, and The Myth of Moral Justice: Why Our Legal System Fails to Do What's Right, and is the editor of the anthology Law Lit, from Atticus Finch to “The Practice”: A Collection of Great Writing about the Law. He has also published five novels including The Golems of Gotham, Second Hand Smoke and Elijah Visible.

Bret Stephens is an op-ed columnist for The New York Times and a political analyst for NBC. He won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2013.