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| Susan Brison, Associate Professor of Philosophy |
Tuesday, January 17
4:30 pm, Haldeman 041
Reception to follow
It is now commonly recognized that the United States is unique in the degree to which it protects hate speech. With the globalization of media and a growing international understanding about the scope and limits of free speech—expressed in other countries’ statutes and constitutions and in international conventions—American free speech exceptionalism, Brison contends, is a doctrine in increasing need of justification: “Given that U.S. courts and legal theorists have, thus far, failed to develop a consistent and principled First Amendment jurisprudence that explains why hate speech should be constitutionally protected, I argue that American free speech exceptionalism should be a cause for concern rather than a source of national pride.”
Susan Brison teaches in the Department of Philosophy and the Program in Women’s and Gender Studies at Dartmouth College, where she is also the faculty associate in the East Wheelock Program. She is the author of Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self and co-editor of Contemporary Perspectives on Constitutional Interpretation, and she has published numerous scholarly articles on free speech and on sexual violence. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, The Chronicle Review, and other newspapers and magazines.
A Humanities Forum event sponsored by the Leslie Center for the Humanities in cooperation with the Martin Luther King Celebration and the Dartmouth Centers Forum program “Words and their Consequences.”
