The Georgetown Journal of Legislation and Public Coverage has printed my newest regulation evaluate publication titled “The Proper to Rage: Free Speech and Rage Rhetoric in American Political Discourse,” 21 Geo. J.L. & Pub. Pol’y 481. The work explores rage rhetoric and a number of the areas addressed in my forthcoming e book, The Indispensable Proper: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.
Right here is the outline from the introduction of the article:
This text explores the therapy and worth of rage rhetoric. It’s going to problem the persevering with maintain of functionalist rationales, together with the Courtroom’s view that some speech may be extra vulnerable to criminalization than others as a result of it’s extra “virulent” or has a larger affect towards felony conduct. These underlying rationales may be traced again to early seditious libel instances. This text explores how rage rhetoric has been handled traditionally and legally, together with latest efforts to criminalize “poisonous ideologies.” The article briefly explores our historical past of rage rhetoric within the English and colonial intervals, together with defining moments in United States historical past just like the Boston Tea Social gathering. It then explores how rage rhetoric has been addressed by the courts from the eighteenth to twenty-first centuries. The article appears on the rationales utilized by courts in criminalizing rageful or radical rhetoric inside First Modification jurisprudence. Many of those selections proceed limiting ideas articulated in early English regulation by figures akin to William Blackstone. The residual or lingering components of these views proceed to be expressed in judicial opinions. Lastly, the article explores how the January sixth riot revived these residual components in calls for brand spanking new laws and prosecutions.
I want to thank the entire regulation college students at Georgetown who helped put together this regulation evaluate for publication.
