Academic

Morgan on Mill's Liberalism & Group Defamation

By Lawrence Solum

Glyn Morgan (Harvard University) has posted Mill's Liberalism, Security, and Group Defamation on SSRN.  Here is the abstract:

Western liberal democracies do not treat all forms of expression in the same way. Typically, they treat some categories of expression as deserving of special protection - religious doctrines and political debate, for instance. They treat other categories of expression as deserving of only a lesser form of protection - commercial advertising, for instance. And they treat still other forms of expression as worthy not of protection but criminal prosecution, as in the case of child pornography, cross-burning, and, at least in some countries, Holocaust denial. This paper examines the tension between freedom of religious expression - typically thought of as a category deserving special protection - and group defamation or hate speech - in particular the defamation of religious groups and homosexuals. Drawing on Mill's defence of free speech, this paper argues that freedom of expression trumps group defamation, except in those cases where expression poses a threat to physical security.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on February 05, 2008 (boomark / email).