Already in my teens, I became aware of the need for LGBTQ+ rights. I read whatever I could find on the topic, and when I wrote my first book it was titled Sexual Orientation: A Human Right. However, I noticed that many fellow activists advocated bans on speech hostile to LGBTQ+ people. I became skeptical about governments punishing individuals who express evil ideas. Still, I hope you will benefit from my list of books that take various sides in free speech debates and focus not only on LGBTQ+ people. After all, what’s the point of free speech if not to hear about a problem from diverse viewpoints?
I wrote...
The Most Human Right: Why Free Speech Is Everything
I will never forget Professor Kennedy’s welcome speech during my first week at Harvard Law School, trembling in my boots that admitting me must have been some sort of administrative error. Kennedy’s penetrating wit showed me what we need to know if we want to think effectively about complex social controversies.
That impression was powerfully confirmed when I read his outstanding book about racist speech. Tracing back through his own childhood steeped in racial discrimination, Kennedy explains the problems we cause when we allow people to voice racist ideas and the problems we cause when we try to censor them.
The twentieth anniversary edition of one of the most controversial books ever published on race and language is now more relevant than ever in this season of racial reckoning—from “one of our most important and perceptive writers on race" (The Washington Post).
In addition to a brave and bracing inquiry into the origins, uses, and impact of the infamous word, this edition features an extensive new introduction that addresses major developments in its evolution during the last two decades of its vexed history.
In the new introduction to his classic work, Kennedy questions the claim that “nigger” is the most…
I disagree with the authors’ conclusions, but I agree with their diagnosis. This book is aimed at students yet written in a style that anyone can grasp. The authors defy the old “Sticks and Stones” dictum, explaining how even seemingly mild racism feeds into deeper patterns that undermine our ability to relate to each other as citizens of a single democratic society.
Although I agree with stricter controls on internet platforms, I disagree with the authors’ proposals for punishing individual speakers. Whether you accept or reject their proposals, their account of how racist attitudes spread is passionate and compelling.
Successor and companion volume to Words that Wound, the first book to argue for recognition of hate speech as a serious social problem. The current volume greatly expands the coverage of hate speech, including chapters on children, the internet, recent cases, campus hate speech codes, and international responses. Deals expressly with arguments against hate-speech regulation, as well as the case for it.
Written by leading critical race theorists Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, this volume succinctly explores a host of issues presented by hate speech, including legal theories for regulating it, the harms it causes, and policy arguments pro and…
It didn’t begin with Donald Trump. When the Republican Party lost five straight presidential elections during the 1930s and 1940s, three things happened: (1) Republicans came to believe that presidential elections are rigged; (2) Conspiracy theories arose and were believed; and (3) The presidency was elevated to cult-like status.
I am Nadine Strossen’s Number One fan. What an amazing career–daughter of a Holocaust survivor, directly targeted by Nazi hate speech, yet today Professor Strossen stands out as America’s most prominent advocate of free speech.
Having served as President of the American Civil Liberties Union for an impressive term of more than fifteen years, Strossen used this book to outline in a concise yet fact-filled way the reasons why hateful attitudes are damaging, yet legal punishments on individual speakers would be even more damaging.
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…
I found this book to be one of the best introductions to the endless dilemmas surrounding free speech. In the first half of the twentieth century, anxieties about free speech in the United States were triggered mostly on the left, with government attempts to stifle socialists and communists culminating in Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunts, damaging and even destroying thousands of lives and careers.
Philippa Strum shows how, after the 1950s, this completely changed. The government’s increasing focus on far-right speech became an issue of burning importance when residents of a small Illinois town, home to Holocaust survivors, tried to block a Nazi march–and the courts said “No” in the name of free speech.
In the Chicago suburb of Skokie, one out of every six Jewish citizens in the late 1970s was a survivor--or was directly related to a survivor--of the Holocaust. These victims of terror had resettled in America expecting to lead peaceful lives free from persecution. But their safe haven was shattered when a neo-Nazi group announced its intention to parade there in 1977. Philippa Strum's dramatic retelling of the events in Skokie (and in the courts) shows why the case ignited such enormous controversy and challenged our understanding of and commitment to First Amendment values.
In May 1941, Bartlesville, Oklahoma, hums with talk of spring flowers, fishing derbies, and the growing war in Europe. And for the residents of a quiet neighborhood boarding house, the winds of change are blowing.
Self-proclaimed spinster, Bessie Blackwell, is the reluctant owner of a new pair of glasses. The…
Waldron’s proposals for punishing individual speakers are unpersuasive, but I admire his effort to translate difficult historical and legal material into everyday language. Many writers try to challenge American First Amendment principles by questioning the very foundations of Western parliamentary democracy.
Waldron does the opposite. He articulates his challenge by arguing that speech restrictions are faithful to the letter and spirit of a democratic constitution. I disagree–at least with the way Waldron makes his case–but he does make his case clearly, and with this book, he has influenced a generation of disciples.
Every liberal democracy has laws or codes against hate speech-except the United States. For constitutionalists, regulation of hate speech violates the First Amendment and damages a free society. Against this absolutist view, Jeremy Waldron argues powerfully that hate speech should be regulated as part of our commitment to human dignity and to inclusion and respect for members of vulnerable minorities.
Causing offense-by depicting a religious leader as a terrorist in a newspaper cartoon, for example-is not the same as launching a libelous attack on a group's dignity, according to Waldron, and it lies outside the reach of law. But defamation…
Throughout history, countless systems of justice have promised human goods. Goods are things that governments may give you–and may stop giving you–whenever they see fit. Rights are different. They are something that you can fight for on your own.
But you can do this only with free speech. By failing to distinguish between goods and rights, governments around the world have destroyed human rights even while claiming to promote them. Sadly, this failure has occurred in order to appease autocratic governments. I wrote this book to show that without free speech the very concept of a “right” makes no sense. Why? Because human goods become human rights only when citizens can claim them publicly and fearlessly.
Trapped in her enormous, devout Catholic family in 1963, Annie creates a hilarious campaign of lies when the pope dies and their family friend, Cardinal Stefanucci, is unexpectedly on the shortlist to be elected the first American pope.
Driven to elevate her family to the holiest of holy rollers in…
The first and only full-length biography of Hazel Ying Lee, an unrecognized pioneer and unsung World War II hero who fought for a country that actively discriminated against her gender, race, and ambition.
This unique hidden figure defied countless stereotypes to become the first Asian American woman in United States…
