Meditations on Hate Speech and Censorship

Abstract:

I present a folk model of hate speech causality and defend the American liberal system of tolerating and regulating the speech and behavior, respectively, of even the most infantile and misguided of our citizens. In doing so, I present a brief developmental history of American First Amendment jurisprudence, a very cursory engagement with legal philosophy, and I start it all off with a brief short story to set the mood. If you could suppress hate with a little chip in their mind, would you? The piece was written in 2019 as a paper for a graduate course and I was primarily thinking about anti LGBTQ hate crimes while reflecting upon prior empirical work. I encourage others to take any pieces of the document that they find especially intriguing to develop a more up to date article, regardless of whether they seek to build upon or to challenge the arguments contained within.

^{This was a course paper for a graduate seminar in American Legal Philosophy, UT Austin, 2019.}