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The Rise and Fall of Group Libel: The Forgotten Campaign for Hate Speech Laws
Get PDFIt is well-known that there is no “hate speech” law in the United States. This has been criticized, especially given the existence of robust hate speech laws in other nations. The absence of hate speech laws in American law has been attributed to legal, cultural, and historical factors, including speech protective First Amendment jurisprudence and long-standing skepticism of group reputation as an interest worthy of legal protection.
This Article presents another reason for the absence of hate speech laws in America: the failure of a large-scale social movement in the 1940s to pass hate speech laws or “group libel” laws, as they were known. For over a decade, activists called for legislation that would impose civil liability and criminal punishment for speech that disparaged racial and religious groups. This movement was a response to the proliferation of anti-Semitic and fascist hate groups in the U.S. before and during the Second World War. Existing libel laws, which addressed the defamation of individuals, were inadequate to address the problem of group defamation. The movement to pass state and federal group libel laws produced a robust national dialogue on the problem of hate speech in the 1940s, but little in the way of actual law.
The “group libel law movement” rose and fell quickly, declining— ironically—just before the Supreme Court issued its 1952 decision in Beauharnais v. Illinois, approving the constitutionality of an Illinois group libel law. By that time, the movement for group libel laws had dissipated, and many onetime proponents of such laws rejected them. The Beauharnais decision led to no new group libel laws, in part because there were few remaining advocates to promote them. Had the group libel law movement persisted, the United States might have taken a different approach to the regulation of hate speech
Unauthorized Tax Elections
Get PDFUnauthorized tax elections are those devices and techniques that taxpayers employ to achieve sought-after objectives but that are not specifically endorsed under the Internal Revenue Code. Often evolving over time, they are a common feature of the nation’s tax system. While unauthorized tax elections can prove subversive, in many instances, if properly and timely addressed, their existence can produce salutary benefits vis-à-vis their eradication or formal institutionalization.
This analysis explores the general contours of unauthorized tax elections and the critical signaling roles that they provide, alerting Congress and the Treasury Department to shortcomings and vulnerabilities in the Internal Revenue Code’s statutory language and/or structural design. It concludes that both the legislative and administrative branches of government would be wise to not ignore these signals but instead to swiftly address them
Academic Brands and Cognitive Dissonance
Get PDFPublished as Chapter 7 in Academic Brands: Distinction in Global Higher Education (Mario Biagioli & Madhavi Sunder, eds., Cambridge University Press, 2022).
It is hard to reconcile the research university’s supposed reason for being – the reasoned pursuit of knowledge – with its methods for building brand awareness and equity. Just like pitches for other luxury goods, the selling of higher education depends on irrational appeals devoid of information and marketing missives meant to hug the line between legally protected puffery and outright fraud. Although universities have always borrowed from the selling strategies of the commercial sphere, in recent years, there has been a sea change in the prevalence and degree of less-than-truthful content in higher educational self-promotion. How do university constituents – administrators, professors, students – interpret this gap between their institutions’ traditionally understood role and the logic of today’s academic branding strategies? The chapter chronicles the main rationalizations these actors deploy to reduce the tension between academic mission and academic marketing. By telling themselves that their school’s advertising efforts can be quarantined from the university’s larger purpose or actually provide tangible and truthful information to outside audiences or are a necessary evil, university constituents reduce their internal dissonance but fail to confront the realities of academic branding.https://digitalcommons.law.buffalo.edu/book_sections/1424/thumbnail.jp
Baldy Center Podcast Episode 2 Picture
No full text2021 Baldy Center Workshop — Medical Posthumanities: Governing Health Beyond the Human. Illustration courtesy of NIH Nanotechnology Image Library.https://digitalcommons.law.buffalo.edu/baldy_center_images/1001/thumbnail.jp
Baldy Center Podcast Episode 5 Picture
No full textBook cover lithograph, Intertidal History in Island Southeast Asia: Submerged Genealogy and the Legacy of Costal Capture. Illustration depicts Naval battle off the coast of Celebes between the VOC and forces under Makassar during the Great Ambon War (1651-1656), part of the spice wars. From Livinus Bor (1663), Amboinse oorlog door Arnold de Vlaming van Oudshoorn als superintendent, over d’oostersegewesten oorlogaftig ten eind gebracht, 1663. The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, 3088 G 34.https://digitalcommons.law.buffalo.edu/baldy_center_images/1004/thumbnail.jp
The Committee of Style and the Federalist Constitution
Get PDFThe conventional interpretation of the Constitution assumes that the Committee of Style, which created the final draft of the Constitution, lacked authority to engage with substance; therefore, any arguably substantive changes it purportedly made should be disregarded in favor of earlier draft language found in the records of the Constitutional Convention. This “Style doctrine” has been embraced by the Supreme Court and several leading constitutional scholars. This Article argues that the Style doctrine is historically unfounded and obscures the Constitution’s original meaning. The Committee of Style was not prohibited from proposing substantive changes. In any case, most of the revisions proposed by the Committee of Style clarified or reinforced Federalist positions rather than suggesting substantive changes. Ultimately, the Style doctrine is an artifact of post-ratification developments tending to disregard elements of the more nationalistic constitutional vision of the Federalist Framers
Life and Afterlife in the \u3cem\u3eSteel Seizure Case\u3c/em\u3e
Get PDFThis Essay examines the proper role of the Supreme Court in deciding disputes between Congress and the President. Progressive commentators are now urging the Court to dismiss these cases as political questions, at least where doing so would give effect to congressional regulations of the President. The Court’s interference is criticized as antidemocratic. This Essay advances a different conception of the Supreme Court’s role by examining the famous Steel Seizure Case. In that case, the Court upheld an injunction barring President Truman from seizing the nation’s steel mills, on grounds that doing so was inconsistent with congressional will and without any basis in the President’s independent constitutional authority. The subsequent embrace of Justice Jackson’s concurrence shows how Supreme Court decisions can have an effect outside the immediate confines or “life” of a case. In its “afterlife”—its use by members of Congress, officers and employees in the executive branch, and legal educators and other members of the public—Jackson’s concurrence has acquired a kind of democratic authority. In Congress, for example, it was quoted in legislative debates preceding the passage of the War Powers Resolution, the National Emergencies Act, and the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act, among other statutes. Justice Jackson’s broad, theoretical language and flexible framework proved useful to legislators seeking to regulate the President. By constructing his concurrence this way, Jackson helped to give it a central place in structuring the political maintenance of our Constitution’s separation of powers
The Conceptual Problems Arising from Legal Pluralism
Get PDFThis paper argues that analytical jurisprudence has been insufficiently attentive to three significant puzzles highlighted by the legal pluralist tradition: the existence of commonalities between different types of law, the possibility of a distinction between law and non-law, and the explanatory centrality of the state. I further argue that the resolution of these questions sets the stage for a renewed agenda of analytical jurisprudence and has to be considered in attempts for reconciliation between the academic traditions of analytical jurisprudence and legal pluralism, often called “pluralist jurisprudence.” I also argue that the resolution of these problems affects the empirical, doctrinal, and politico-moral inquiries about legal pluralism