I am a retired federal constitutional law professor, the former Fredric C. Tausend Professor of Constitutional Law at Seattle University Law School. Moreover, I am the coauthor of more than ten books, most of them focusing on First Amendment free speech topics. Often, I wrote at the intersection of popular culture and free speech rights. My booklist reflects my passion for books about the history, purposes, and practices of freedom of speech, particularly as it is exercised in the United States.
I wrote
The Trials of Lenny Bruce: The Fall and Rise of an American Icon
I have read dozens of books on a variety of free speech topics–everything from political dissent to hate speech to pornography. But I have never found a single book on the entire history of free speech over the ages of Western civilization.
I love the way that this work portrayed the most significant free speech struggles from ancient Greece and Rome, through the Enlightenment, and beyond to today’s social media controversies. More often than not, histories are boring and pedantic, but this history kept me involved and interested right up to the last page.
A global history of free speech, from the ancient world to today.
Hailed as the "first freedom," free speech is the bedrock of democracy. But it is a challenging principle, subject to erosion in times of upheaval. Today, in democracies and authoritarian states around the world, it is on the retreat. In Free Speech, Jacob Mchangama traces the riveting legal, political, and cultural history of this idea. Through captivating stories of free speech's many defenders - from the ancient Athenian orator Demosthenes and the ninth-century freethinker al-Razi, to Mary Wollstonecraft, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and modern-day digital activists - Mchangama…
Although Stanley Fish is recognized as a major scholar in English studies, I was intrigued by his controversial and searing criticism of the American culture at large. I loved his witty and easily understandable attacks on everything from multiculturalism, affirmative action, and hate speech to legal reform–and on all sides of these social and political debates.
It was fascinating to see Fish turn from his assault on conservative claims to traditional values to demolish the intellectual left’s commitments to equality and non-discrimination.
In an era when much of what passes for debate is merely moral posturing - traditional family values versus the cultural elite, free speech versus censorship - the terms `liberal' and `politically correct', are used with as much dismissive scorn by the right as `reactionary' and `fascist' are by the left.
In There's No Such Thing as Free Speech, Fish takes aim at the ideological gridlock paralyzing academic and political exchange in the nineties. In his witty, accessible dissections of the swirling controversies over multiculturalism, affirmative action, canon revision, hate speech, and legal reform, he takes both the left and…
Noam Chomsky has been praised by the likes of Bono and Hugo Chávez and attacked by the likes of Tom Wolfe and Alan Dershowitz. Groundbreaking linguist and outspoken political dissenter—voted “most important public intellectual in the world today” in a 2005 magazine poll—Chomsky inspires fanatical devotion and fierce vituperation.
Like most people alive today, I am an avid user of the Internet and am aware of the astounding changes that electronic media have made to communication. With the rise of social media and AI, I am increasingly aware of the profound effects that these media already have and will have on society in general. However, I lived in the print age without specifically focusing on the socio-economic and political changes that the printing press advanced.
I love Eisenstein’s book because it brilliantly portrays the astounding global and cultural aftermath of the Gutenberg invention.
Originally published in two volumes in 1980, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change is now issued in a paperback edition containing both volumes. The work is a full-scale historical treatment of the advent of printing and its importance as an agent of change. Professor Eisenstein begins by examining the general implications of the shift from script to print, and goes on to examine its part in three of the major movements of early modern times - the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the rise of modern science.
I have been puzzled over the progressive left’s calls for governmental censorship for hate speech that they abhor, when they have so often been the victims of such governmental campaigns against subversive speech.
Nadine Strossen, the former national president of the ACLU, whom I have long called “The First Lady of Liberty,” has provided very strong arguments against such progressive calls for censorship. I love how Strossen, a true liberal in her own right, turns the tables on her more extremist partisan colleagues and makes a very good case for the old adage, “Not Censorship, but More Speech”!
HATE dispels misunderstandings plaguing our perennial debates about hate speech vs. free speech, showing that the First Amendment approach promotes free speech and democracy, equality, and societal harmony. We hear too many incorrect assertions that hate speech which has no generally accepted definition is either absolutely unprotected or absolutely protected from censorship. Rather, U.S. law allows government to punish hateful or discriminatory speech in specific contexts when it directly causes imminent serious harm, but government may not punish such speech solely because its message is disfavored, disturbing, or vaguely feared to possibly contribute to some future harm. When U.S. officials…
What were America's first prisons like? How did penal reformers, prison administrators, and politicians deal with the challenges of confining human beings in long-term captivity as punishment--what they saw as a humane intervention?
The Deviant Prison centers on one early prison: Eastern State Penitentiary. Built in Philadelphia, one of the…
Freedom of speech means many things to many people, but often the advocates of free speech have not thought very clearly or deeply about the purposes for protecting speech and the reasons for the American free speech system.
Of all of the books on free speech theory that I have read, I appreciate Fred Schauer’s book the most. It is truly a classic about the philosophical foundations of freedom of speech. Do not be intimidated by the idea of free speech theory: Schauer’s book can be understood by any serious nonfiction reader, and I highly recommend it for its powerful reasoning and beautiful prose.
Lenny Bruce spoke words that had the power to provoke laughter and debate–as well as shock and outrage. He committed his life to telling the truth through his comedy, but the truth he told infuriated those in power, and authorities in the largest and most progressive cities in America worked effortlessly to put him in jail. To them, Lenny’s words were filthy and depraved, but to his fans, his words were a light in the darkness of the repressive society of the late 1950s and early 1960s.
This book is the first carefully documented account of Bruce’s career and free speech struggles. With dynamic narrative flair, the authors paint a vivid, hilarious, and tragic portrait of the comedian, a man far too honest for his time.
Return to Hope Creek is a second-chance rural romance set in Australia.
Stella Simpson's career and engagement are over. She returns to the rural community of Hope Creek to heal, unaware her high school and college sweetheart, Mitchell Scott, has also moved back to town to do some healing of…
This book is a spy novel with a satirical edge which will take you on a heart-pumping journey through the streets, mountains, jungles, and beaches of Colombia. Our Man in Havana meets A Clear and Present Danger.
