Should Hate Speech Be Outlawed? [View all]

[rug]

The Harm in Hate Speech
by Jeremy Waldron
Harvard University Press, 292 pp., $26.95



A Ku Klux Klan rally in Hico, Texas, 1990 (Carl De Keyzer/Magnum Photos)

June 7, 2012
John Paul Stevens

In The Harm in Hate Speech, Jeremy Waldron discusses a loosely defined category of expression that he addressed in a review of Anthony Lewis’s book Freedom for the Thought That We Hate in The New York Review in 2008, and in the Oliver Wendell Holmes Lectures at Harvard University in 2009. Although his references to Justice Holmes in this book are not exactly flattering—Waldron writes that “at one time or another [Holmes] took both sides on most free speech issues,” and that Holmes’s judgment “that criticizing the military was comparable to shouting ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater” is “preposterous”—in her introduction of Waldron at the Holmes Lectures, Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow praised Waldron as “one of the two or three greatest legal philosophers of our time.” That high praise also applies to one of Waldron’s former teachers, Ronald Dworkin, who has criticized Waldron’s writing about hate speech.

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After noting the variation in the scope of hate speech regulations in other countries, the book’s first chapter, “Approaching Hate Speech,” describes only in broad strokes the kind of speech about which Waldron is concerned:

The use of words which are deliberately abusive and/or insulting and/or threatening and/or demeaning directed at members of vulnerable minorities, calculated to stir up hatred against them.

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Thus, instead of stating a general proposition that he either supports or opposes, Waldron begins by providing the reader with the facts of what may well have been an actual incident in New Jersey. A Muslim man, walking with his two children, turns a corner on a public street and is unexpectedly confronted with a sign saying: “Muslims and 9/11! Don’t serve them, don’t speak to them, and don’t let them in.” The father is not sure how to respond to his children’s questions about that message, or other signs expressing hostility to Muslims. Waldron describes those signs

loosely as “hate speech,” putting them in the same category as racist graffiti, burning crosses, and earlier generations of signage that sought to drive Jews out of fashionable areas in Florida with postings like “Jews and Dogs Prohibited.”

That example of anti-Muslim speech is important for two reasons. First, it has nothing to do with violence. The speaker has not threatened anyone, and there is no suggestion that the message will provoke a violent response by any of its targets or violent attacks against Muslims by those who sympathize with the views of the speaker. Thus, most of our Supreme Court opinions concerning the First Amendment protection for speech that may lead to violence are simply inapplicable to Waldron’s thesis that government should regulate speech of this kind. Second, the principal reason why Waldron believes such regulation would be desirable is not just to protect the targets of hate speech from offense. Rather it is to protect the inclusive character of a society that should respect the dignity of all of its members.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/jun/07/should-hate-speech-be-outlawed/?page=1

Long, worthwhile book review by the retired Supreme Court Justice.