“Free Speech and Trust in Authority,” Keith Whittington, Yale Law School

Event time: 
Wednesday, October 9, 2024 - 8:45am to 9:45am
Location: 
Institution for Social and Policy Studies, Common Room See map
77 Prospect Street
New Haven, CT 06511
Event description: 

ISPS BREAKFAST TALK

Central to the American tradition of expanding protections for controversial speech is a robust distrust of potential censors to make reasonable judgments about what speech should be suppressed. But the arguments for a more restrictive approach to speech often implicitly or explicitly evince much greater trust in the likely decisionmakers who will be entrusted with the authority to suppress speech. Whether restricting Communist speech, antiwar speech, “hate speech,” or “disinformation,” the case for empowering some authority figure-such as campus administrators, technology company employees, or government officials-builds on an assumption that those authority figures will be motivated by good intentions and be endowed with good judgment to make reasonable distinctions between the speech that should be tolerated and the speech that should not. Such confidence would often seem to be misplaced.

PLEASE RSVP TO RESERVE BREAKFAST

Keith E. Whittington is the David Boies Professor of Law at Yale Law School. Whittington’s teaching and scholarship span American constitutional theory, American political and constitutional history, judicial politics, the presidency, and free speech and the law. He is the author of You Can’t Teach That! The Battle Over University Classrooms (2024), Repugnant Laws: Judicial Review of Acts of Congress from the Founding to the Present (2019), and Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech (2018), as well as Constitutional Interpretation (1999), Political Foundations of Judicial Supremacy (2007), and other works on constitutional theory and law and politics.

Open to: 
Yale Community Only