This year's installment in the Davis, Markert, Nickerson Lecture series occurred Friday November 9, when Nadine Strossen, President of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), discussed the growing vulnerability of academic and intellectual freedom, and how the American Civil Liberties Union protects these First Amendment rights at U-M's Law School.
After a brief introduction by University Librarian and former Provost Paul Courant, Strossen, a Professor at the New York Law School, and president of the ACLU since 1991, began to outline the importance of preserving freedom in spite of the costs of protecting the rights of those who use hate speech. Strossen's lecture was entitled "Defending Freedom: Even for the Thoughts We Hate."
Strossen points out how in the post-9/11 world, today's forms of censorship seem justified because of the goal of protecting against terrorism. Examples include government wiretapping, prosecuting the press for exposing illegal government activities, and censoring the internet.
However, Strossen said that the American public labors under a historical hubris, a concept that implies that each generation thinks they are encountering new, unique obstacles that require special exceptions when, in hindsight, they should actually be looking back on history with humility.
"Later generations can have the privilege of seeing how the government has oppressed those in the past," said Strossen, which is why she emphasizes the "bedrock principle of content neutrality" in all cases the ACLU undertakes.
Exercising content neutrality is perhaps best seen in the Skokie case of 1978. Skokie was home to a sizable number of Holocaust survivors, and members of the National Socialist Party of America (affiliated with the American Nazi Party) planned to march through it. The village refused to allow the march, and the ACLU interceded to represent the NSPA. The NSPA won the case on the basis of First Amendment rights and continued their march. 15 percent of ACLU members consequently resigned.
Representing controversial clients proves the content neutrality and nonpartisanship of the ACLU, Strossen explained.
"We all have different ideas for what the 'just one' exception is for the cases we cannot represent: people who exercise racism, hate speech, or the desecration of the United States flag. If you add all these exceptions up, it drowns out content neutrality altogether," said Strossen.
Strossen admitted that many of the cases the ACLU represents appear to be defending "dangerous, odious, evil ideas that go too far," referencing the Skokie case as an example, but she explained that these demonstrated how first amendment rights are taken for granted until one's own views are attacked.
However, she noted the ACLU complies with Supreme Court rules that hate speech can only be limited if it is associated with direct, causal harm. First Amendment rights cannot be curtailed if the action merely hurts feelings or could possibly lead to potential danger.
The importance in preserving free speech is an issue that cuts across all party lines. "The cure can be seen as worse than the disease. If the government restrains our freedoms, it eliminates the choices we have and we cannot decide ourselves. In this case, it is better for us to be vulnerable to all forms of expression rather than to place all the power in the government," said Strossen.
This was the seventeenth lecture in the Davis, Markert, Nickerson series. Established in 1990 by the Senate Advisory Committee for University Affairs (SACUA), the series honors the three University faculty members-Chandler Davis, Clement Markert and Mark Nickerson-who were either suspended or dismissed of their positions after invoking their Constitutional right to refuse revealing their political orientation during the Red Scare of the 1950s. MR
Be the first to comment on this article!