By: Andrew Trask 

When it comes to free speech, the United States is an outlier. The right to offend your neighbor may be a time-honored American legal tradition, but to much of Western world, a more hospitable standard prevails. In today’s New York Times, an article by Adam Liptak contrasted America’s free speech laws with those of other countries, concluding that “[m]any foreign courts have respectfully considered the American approach – and then rejected it.”

To illustrate, Liptak highlighted a pending Canadian trial involving a magazine article deemed offensive to Muslims. The Canadian Islamic Congress asserted that the article injured Muslims’ “dignity, feelings and self-respect,” and that, among other remedies, the magazine should be forbidden from publishing similar articles. A Canadian tribunal will soon rule on whether the article violated a provincial hate speech law.

Although the Canadian article may have offended the senses, its publication in America would not have raised an eyebrow from a free speech standpoint. Professor Frederick Schauer, a Professor at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, commented that “the American First Amendment . . . remains a recalcitrant outlier to a growing international understanding of what the freedom of expression entails.” The First Amendment generally stands guard over provocative, insulting, and even hateful language. One significant free speech limitation under American law is that the government may curtail speech that is likely to incite imminent violence. This has proved a difficult standard to meet, however. American courts have upheld speech by a Ku Klux Klan member advocating hatred and violence, and have refused to halt an American Nazi Party march even though it would have deeply distressed numerous Holocaust survivor residents.

By contrast, other nations are less tolerant of hate speech. The Canadian Supreme Court, in the 1990 case of R. v. Keegstra , upheld the conviction of a school teacher for “unlawfully promoting hatred . . . by communicating anti-Semetic statements to his students.” Liptak noted that, in addition to Canada, “England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, South Africa, Australia and India all have laws or have signed international conventions banning hate speech.”

Liptak’s New York Times article effectively illustrates that America, in contrast to many other countries, gives free speech free rein.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 12th, 2008 at 10:58 am and is filed under Culture Forum Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.