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Full-Text Articles in Constitutional Law

“Fire Away”: I Have No Right To Not Be Insulted, David Barnhizer Jan 2015

“Fire Away”: I Have No Right To Not Be Insulted, David Barnhizer

David Barnhizer

In theory, universities are the institutions that are responsible for advancing our freedom of thought and discourse through the work of independent scholars and the teaching of each generation of students. But for several decades, universities and other educational institutions have increasingly set up rules aimed at protecting individuals and groups from criticism that those newly empowered individuals and groups consider insensitive, offensive, harassing, intolerant and disrespectful, or critical of their core belief systems. Even though it has been claimed that disadvantaged interest groups have a right to use one-sided tactics of intolerance against those they consider to be responsible …


Surveillance, Speech Suppression And Degradation Of The Rule Of Law In The “Post-Democracy Electronic State”, David Barnhizer Jan 2014

Surveillance, Speech Suppression And Degradation Of The Rule Of Law In The “Post-Democracy Electronic State”, David Barnhizer

David Barnhizer

None of us can claim the quality of original insight achieved by Alexis de Tocqueville in his early 19th Century classic Democracy in America in his observation that the “soft” repression of democracy was unlike that in any other political form. It is impossible to deny that we in the US, the United Kingdom and Western Europe are experiencing just such a “gentle” drift of the kind that Tocqueville describes, losing our democratic integrity amid an increasingly “pretend” democracy. He explained: “[T]he supreme power [of government] then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society …


Through A Prism Darkly: Surveillance And Speech Suppression In The Post-Democracy Electronic State", David Barnhizer Jan 2013

Through A Prism Darkly: Surveillance And Speech Suppression In The Post-Democracy Electronic State", David Barnhizer

David Barnhizer

Through a PRISM Darkly: Surveillance and Speech Suppression in the “Post-Democracy Electronic State” David Barnhizer There is no longer an American democracy. America is changing by the moment into a new political form, the “Post-Democracy Electronic State”. It has “morphed” into competing fragments operating within the physical territory defined as the United States while tenuously holding on to a few of the basic creeds that represent what we long considered an exceptional political experiment. That post-Democracy political order paradoxically consists of a combination of fragmented special interests eager to punish anyone that challenges their desires and a central government that …


"Linguistic Cleansing": Strategies For Redesigning Human Perception And Behavior, David Barnhizer Jan 2013

"Linguistic Cleansing": Strategies For Redesigning Human Perception And Behavior, David Barnhizer

David Barnhizer

James Madison recognized the need to balance competing interests in his analysis of factious groups. In Federalist No. 10, Madison sets out the idea of faction in the following words. “By a faction I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” Madison goes on to describe two “cures” for faction. One is to “destroy the liberty” that allows it to bloom, …