Law Commons^™

Coca-Cola Curses: Hate Speech In A Post-Colonial Context, Brittan Heller

Michigan Technology Law Review

Hate speech is a contextual phenomenon. What offends or inflames in one context may differ from what incites violence in a different time, place, and cultural landscape. Theories of hate speech, especially Susan Benesch’s concept of “dangerous speech” (hateful speech that incites violence), have focused on the factors that cut across these paradigms. However, the existing scholarship is narrowly focused on situations of mass violence or societal unrest in America or Europe.

This paper discusses how online hate speech may operate differently in a postcolonial context. While hate speech impacts all societies, the global South—Africa in particular—has been sorely understudied. …

Finding Freedom For The Thoughts We Hate, John M. Greabe

Law Faculty Scholarship

In his dissenting opinion in United States v. Schwimmer (1929), Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., famously defended tolerance as an indispensable constitutional value. He wrote: “[I]f there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought – not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.”

Yet accepting that the Constitution protects the thought that we hate can be difficult, even during the best of times. And these are far from the best of times. Nuclear brinksmanship …

Fulfilling The U.S. Obligation To Prevent Exterminationism: A Comprehensive Approach To Regulating Hate Speech And Dismantling Systems Of Genocide., Sarah E. Ryan

Sarah E Ryan

No abstract provided.

Hate Speech, C. Edwin Baker

All Faculty Scholarship

This paper describes the rationale that a full protection theory of free speech, a theory based on respect for individual autonomy, would give for protecting hate speech. The paper then notes that such a rationale will be unpersuasive to many (including this author) if the harms associated with a failure to outlaw hate speech are as great as often suggested – most dramatically, if the failure to prohibit makes a substantial contribution to the occurrence of serious racial/ethnic violence or genocide. The article then attempts to outline what empirical evidence would be needed to support this conclusion and gives reasons …