Legal Research

Most of the world's liberal democracies honor the idea of free speech, but only in the United States do free speech rights come close to being absolute.  Nazis in the United States were entitled to First Amendment protection for their planned march through an Illinois suburb populated with Holocaust survivors, in Germany and Israel Nazis are banned altogether.  There is, in the United States, a rooted distrust of allowing the government to determine which groups may freely speak, and which groups' speech is too evil to be allowed.  As First Amendment law has developed, it is unconstitutional to treat Klansmen differently from Democrats, Libertarians differently from Nazis.  The ideal is that treatment of speech is content-neutral. 

Other countries have considered the American approach, and rejected it.  Countries such as Germany have made human dignity a preeminent right in their basic law.  These countries make exceptions to free speech rights for so-called "hate speech." Some scholars believe that the United States, too, should sanction hate speech, as dangerous and incendiary in an increasingly combustible world.  Others contend that free speech acts as a disinfectant, and allowing the speech we hate is the best way to make sure its weakness is exposed. Should laws preclude certain types of pernicious speech? See the discussion in the New York Times .