Law Commons^™

Introduction, Terrance Sandalow

Articles

The articles that follow, initially presented in 1983 as the thirty-second series of Thomas M. Cooley Lectures, address a subject that has deep roots in the United States' history. Assurances that there would be constitutional protection of what are now called human rights-in the United States, they have more frequently been referred to as civil liberties and civil rights or individual rights and liberties-was a practical condition for the adoption of the Constitution. The belief that such guarantees are of vital importance in maintaining a society that is both free and just has over time become even more deeply embedded …

Group Libel Versus Free Speech: When Big Brother Should Butt In, Kenneth Lasson

All Faculty Scholarship

The year 1984 may not have fulfilled Orwellian prophecies of governmental totalitarianism, but citizens of the world remain no less concerned about the quality of their civil liberties. If people could live peacefully and productively together under a strict caste system, or blissfully in enslavement, there would be little impetus to identify 'natural rights' nor insistence upon what we know as 'freedom.' But human experience has amply demonstrated the universal yearning for personal liberty, as well as the need to legislate against its deprivation.

Thus Big Brother has been the enemy from long before the Magna Carta and long since …