Law Commons^™

The Legal Challenges Of Diversity (Review Essay), Tanya K. Hernandez

Faculty Scholarship

Within the last year two excellent books, Mariana Valverde’s Everyday Law on the Street: City Governance In an Age of Diversity and Victoria Saker Woeste’s Henry Ford’s War on Jews and the Legal Battle Against Hate Speech, address how social anxieties about “diversity” surface in the development and enforcement of the law. While the two books focus on different eras and countries, they similarly illustrate the tensions in legal contexts that can result from the growth in diversity

Thirteenth Amendment Optimism, Jamal Greene

Faculty Scholarship

Thirteenth Amendment optimism is the view that the Thirteenth Amendment may be used to reach doctrinal outcomes neither specifically intended by the Amendment's drafters nor obvious to contemporary audiences. In prominent legal scholarship, Thirteenth Amendment optimism has supported constitutional rights to abortion and health care and constitutional powers to prohibit hate speech and domestic violence, among other things. This Essay examines the practical utility of Thirteenth Amendment optimism in the face of dim prospects for adaption by courts. The Essay argues that Thirteenth Amendment optimism is most valuable, both historically and today, as a means of motivating the political process …

Intermediaries And Hate Speech: Fostering Digital Citizenship For Our Information Age, Danielle Keats Citron, Helen L. Norton

Faculty Scholarship

No longer confined to isolated corners of the web, cyber hate now enjoys a major presence on popular social media sites. The Facebook group Kill a Jew Day, for instance, acquired thousands of friends within days of its formation, while YouTube has hosted videos with names like How to Kill Beaners, Execute the Gays, and Murder Muslim Scum. The mainstreaming of cyber hate has the troubling potential to shape public expectations of online discourse.

Internet intermediaries have the freedom and influence to seize this defining moment in cyber hate’s history. We believe that a thoughtful and nuanced intermediary-based …

Hate Speech And The Language Of Racism In Latin America: A Lens For Reconsidering Global Hate Speech Restrictions And Legislation Models, Tanya K. Hernandez

Faculty Scholarship

In Latin America, like many countries in Europe, hate speech is prohibited. Yet Latin America is rarely included in the transnational discussion regarding the regulation of hate speech. Instead, the discourse focuses on a comparison of the advisability of Europe's hate speech regulations and free speech acceptance of hate speech in the United States. As a result, the ability to fundamentally examine the connections between hate speech and inequality, in addition to the most effective legal mechanisms for addressing it, is undermined. It is especially critical to broaden the hate speech debate now that we are seeing an apparent rise …

Beyond Lawrence: Metaprivacy And Punishment, Jamal Greene

Faculty Scholarship

Lawrence v. Texas remains, after three years of precedential life, an opinion in search of a principle. It is both libertarian – Randy Barnett has called it the constitutionalization of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty – and communitarian – William Eskridge has described it as the gay rights movement's Brown v. Board of Education. It is simultaneously broad, in its evocation of our deepest spiritual commitments, and narrow, in its self-conscious attempts to avoid condemning laws against same-sex marriage, prostitution, and bestiality. This Article reconciles these competing claims on Lawrence's jurisprudential legacy. In Part I, it defends the …

Civil Actions For Emotional Distress And R.A.V. V. City Of St. Paul, Michael K. Steenson

Faculty Scholarship

The law of emotional distress is characterized by judicial reluctance to create and expand remedies for emotional injuries. The issue here is whether the Court's decision in R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul will impose further limitations on the right to recover civil damages for the intentional infliction of emotional injury, particular emotional injuries resulting from hate speech. This symposium first examines the applicability of the tort to redress claims based on abusive epithets based on the victim's race, gender, or sexual orientation. The symposium then argues that using this tort in cases involving hate speech should not create constitutional …