What We Talk about When We Talk about Free Speech

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy. A B S T R A C TAmerican law is unique among Western nations in its protection of hate speech (defined as speech against groups of people). Limits to any legal speech are viewed as potential encroachments on First Amendment rights. The profession of librarianship has formally embraced and defended a strict interpretation of the First Amendment in The Freedom to Read Statement and in court. However, individual librarians and scholars of law are not unanimous in defending hate speech. This article offers a rhetorical analysis of the defense of hate speech in these fields in order to illustrate a paradox: speech that intimidates is designed to silence others' voices. Good speech does not necessarily offer an antidote to bad speech when bad speech is loud and spoken often. The consequences of allowing all speech in public forums should be regularly evaluated so public spaces remain places where everyone is free to enter and be heard without fear. T he professions of librarianship and law speak about, and urge action regarding, freedom of expression. Free speech is guaranteed under the US Constitution and is a hallmark of American democracy and liberty. This includes the protection of hate speech as political speech, which is unique among Western nations (Braman 2006; Council of Europe 2012). Likewise, librarians, especially under the auspices of the American Library Association(ALA), defend free speech (including, by default, hate speech) in order to protect against ideological exclusions in both the library's space and its collection. A challenge that exists in law and librarianship, though, is that there is not unanimity among individual voices speaking about the topic. Sometimes the message is that there should be no limits to expression, but sometimes speakers say that there should be some boundaries. This article will address the paradoxes inherent in the messages of each field and will explore the nature of those paradoxes. In part, the differences can be said to be rather straightforward disagreements, but the foundations of the disagreements and the rhetoric of the statements of dispute are not always straightforward. Rhetoric and ArgumentationThis article presents contraindications to the First Amendment in rhetoric within librarianship and law. Wayne Booth (2004) defined rhetoric as "the entire range of resources that human beings Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy, vol. 85, no. 1,

The trouble with diverse books, part II: an informational pragmatic analysis

“…Neutrality, social responsibility, democracy, intellectual freedom and the public good are a few that have spawned intensive, persistent debate in the discipline (see, e.g. Bossaller and Budd, 2015;Burgess, 2016;Buschman, 2005;Frick e et al, 2000;Knox and Oltmann, 2018;Lewis, 2008;Macdonald and Birdi, 2019;Roberts and Noble, 2016;Samek, 2001). Notably, these are all concepts that we regularly employ to make claims about the ways in which our information practices (e.g.…”

Skarpt läge – värderingar och vägval vid hantering av kontroversiella föredrag på bibliotek

“…I bibliotekens uppdrag ingår utan tvekan att stå upp för demokratiska värden vilket kan tolkas som att alla budskap inte passar på bibliotek. Skulle yttrandefriheten dras till sin spets kanske biblioteken måste ha kontakt med organisationer som kan vara farliga (Bossaller & Budd, 2015), vilket enligt min mening är helt orimligt. Samtidigt är bibliotekslagens skrivning om att bidra till fri åsiktsbildning (SFS 2013:801, § 2) mycket viktig, särskilt i en tid då yttrandefriheten är hotad i vår omvärld.…”