So to Speak: The Free Speech Podcast

Where are the new frontiers in First Amendment law? Where do scholars and the courts see the potential for expanding First Amendment protections in the future? What technological developments pose challenges to existing First Amendment protections? Our guest on today's episode of So to Speak will help us answer those questions. Professor Eugene Volokh is the Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professo...

Ira Glasser is one of the most consequential civil liberties figures in American history. He ran the ACLU as its executive director from 1978 until his retirement in 2001. In the process, he transformed the organization from a small, $4 million nonprofit with offices in a few cities into a household name with an annual budget of $45 million, a $30 million endowment, and staffed offices in every st...

Sex and the Constitution are not two topics often thought of together. But University of Chicago Law School professor Geoffrey R. Stone seeks to change that with the publication of "Sex and the Constitution: Sex, Religion, and Law from America's Origins to the Twenty-First Century." The newly released, 700-page book is 10 years in the making. Stone's comprehensive review extends all the way back t...

On April 6, Manhattan Institute Fellow Heather Mac Donald was standing in Claremont McKenna College's Athenaeum preparing to give a lecture to an empty room. An empty room was not what Mac Donald expected when she traveled to California from her New York City home to deliver a lecture on her new book, "The War On Cops." But outside the auditorium, close to 300 people had surrounded the Athenaeum,...

From Buckley v. Valeo (1976) to Citizens United v. FEC (2010), legal disputes over the constitutionality of campaign finance laws have captured the general public's attention for decades. At the heart of the debate is a question of whether money donated to political candidates or spent influencing elections is speech protected by the First Amendment. And, if it is, are there countervailing interes...

New technologies and the censorship instinct seem to go hand-in-hand. From the first days of the printing press, to the rise of radio and the telephone, to the advent of the internet, innovations in mass communication are often followed by a fear of what will happen if these novelties are left unrestricted — or uncensored. On today's episode of So to Speak, we speak with former Federal Communicati...

Daryl Davis, a 58-year-old black man, has a question: "How can you hate me if you don't even know me?" For nearly three decades, Davis has been interviewing members of the Ku Klux Klan to find an answer to that question. However, in the course of his research, he found something he didn't expect to find: friendship. You see, while Davis was actively learning about the Klan members, they were passi...

In 1994, law student Rob Corry joined with eight other students to file a legal challenge to a Stanford University speech code. It was the first-ever lawsuit filed under California's recently-enacted "Leonard Law," which applies First Amendment protections to private, non-sectarian colleges in the state of California (like Stanford), and which the students argued made Stanford's restrictions on fr...

Flemming Rose didn't set out to put himself at the center of one of the biggest free speech controversies in recent memory, but 12 years ago he found himself in just that position. In 2005, Rose commissioned and published what are now widely known as "the Muhammad cartoons." Protests against the cartoons resulted in an estimated 200 reported deaths; there were attacks on the offices of Rose's empl...

We continue our conversation about the Turkish government's crackdown on civil society with Middle East Studies Association (MESA) President and City University of New York Professor Beth Baron. MESA has sounded the alarm bells about the threat to academic freedom posed by the Turkish government. In August 2016, they sent a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry regarding persecutions and prosecu...

If you care about free expression, you should care about what's happening in Turkey. Since a failed July 15, 2016 coup attempt against Turkey President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the Turkish government has intensified the use of emergency decrees and laws against terrorist propaganda and insulting the president to purge perceived dissenters within civil society. On today's episode, we are joined by jou...

Ken White has made a name for himself in First Amendment circles for his particularly astute and often comical commentary on free speech issues for the popular "law, liberty, and leisure" blog 'Popehat.' An attorney by day, Ken likes to use his considerable legal chops—he's a 1994 graduate of Harvard Law School—to take a rhetorical axe to what he sees as facile arguments in favor of censorship. Ke...

A precipitous decline in the percentage of schools maintaining severely restrictive speech codes. A proliferation of bias response teams. "Security fee" or "speech tax?" Donald Trump. Milo Yiannopoulos. Penis drawings. These topics and more are covered in our recap of the fall 2016 semester, featuring Foundation for Individual Rights in Education vice presidents Samantha Harris and Will Creeley. A...

In July, the ACLU tapped Georgetown University Law Center Professor David Cole to be its new national legal director. In that role, Cole will oversee nearly 300 lawyers and a docket of about 1,400 state and federal lawsuits. On today's episode of "So to Speak," Wall Street Journal Supreme Court Correspondent Jess Bravin interviews Cole about his new job and explores some of the hottest topics in t...

Attorney Martin Garbus' client list is a who's who of the world's foremost artists, politicians, corporations, scientists, and political dissidents. In a career spanning a half century, he's represented actors Sean Connery and Al Pacino, authors Tom Brokaw and Nancy Reagan, and even Nobel Prize winners Vaclav Havel and Andrei Sakharov. Although Garbus holds a diverse practice, he is perhaps most f...

In 1996, Emory University Professor Deborah Lipstadt found herself in a peculiar situation: she and a team of lawyers would have to defend the truth about the Holocaust against British historian and famed Holocaust denier David Irving. It was a quirk of the English legal system that allowed the battle to play out in court. In England, the burden of proof in libel cases rests on the defendant, not...

The time of America's founding was full of raucous debate and widespread dissent. Americans built effigies, wrote pamphlets, sang songs, and gathered at liberty trees to protest British rule. But while citizens of the 13 colonies, and later America, might have acted like they had a right to express themselves in the myriad ways that they did, the spectre of seditious libel—illegal statements criti...

"How do you make the case for freedom of speech these days?," asks Brendan O'Neill in the latest episode of "So to Speak." The question is a serious one for O'Neill. As the editor of the online British current-affairs magazine "spiked," he is on the front lines every day fighting to preserve free speech and a free press in a legal environment that doesn't have a First Amendment. In a part of the w...

"Two inflammatory words … one wild drink. Nectar imprisoned in a bottle. Let it out. It is cruel to keep a wild animal locked up." When artist and illustrator Ralph Steadman wrote those words for the label of Flying Dog Brewery's "Raging Bitch" Belgian-style IPA, he had no idea that cruel imprisonment would be precisely their fate. In 2009, the Michigan Liquor Control Commission banned the sale of...

"Unfortunately, Title IX has really become unmoored from its original intention," says Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) Executive Director Robert Shibley. Title IX is the 1972 law that prohibits sex discrimination in federally funded educational programs. The active part of the law is less than 40 words long. But in a forthcoming book entitled "Twisting Title IX," Shibley argue...

Earlier this year, Jason Riley was "disinvited" from speaking at Virginia Tech due to concerns that his writings on race would spark campus protests. The Wall Street Journal columnist, Fox News commentator, and Manhattan Institute senior fellow wasn't alone in seeing an invitation to speak on campus be revoked due to concerns that his appearance might prove controversial. He was in distinguished c...

Every year, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education puts out a list of the 10 worst colleges for free speech. And this year, surprisingly, half of the schools on the list earned their spot because they threatened faculty's right to speak out in some way. One institution on that list was Northwestern University. Last year, Northwestern made headlines for its extraordinary attacks on acade...

His trials began with a police bust at the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco in October 1961, and ended with an obscenity conviction in New York in November 1964. Stand-up comedy legend Lenny Bruce underwent 35 months—1,062 days—of nonstop persecution and prosecution for the content of his act. It was 50 years ago this month that an autopsy would report that Bruce died of an overdose of morphine on A...

Kelly Carlin, Rain Pryor, and Kitty Bruce are the daughters of the godfathers of comedy. Their fathers, George Carlin, Richard Pryor, and Lenny Bruce, shaped the stand-up comedy you hear today. If you listen to any of their routines and none of them surprise you, it's because they influenced every comedian who came later. In this exclusive interview, the daughters speak out for the first time toge...

Nationwide polls on support for free speech are full of contradictions. Research conducted by Gallup, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and the Newseum Institute earlier this year found widespread support from college students for free speech in the abstract. However, the same poll also found tepid support when students were asked about specifics. According to the poll, a majority of res...