The Value & Costs of Free Speech, ft. Katherine Cross, Jamal Greene, Eric Heinze, & Nadine Strossen
Channel: NEIU Libraries
Date: 31/08/2022

On Wednesday, August 24, 2022 the NEIU Libraries hosted a panel discussion featuring four scholars — Katherine Cross, Jamal Greene, Eric Heinze, and Nadine Strossen — with distinct perspectives on the value and costs of free speech. This event was moderated by Crystalynn Ortiz, a master’s student of History at Northeastern Illinois University and the founder and president of the NEIU History Club.

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech. For centuries, free speech advocates have argued that a free and prosperous society depends upon the right of each individual to express themselves without fear of government censorship. Those who favor limitations on speech rights have countered that governments should have the legal authority to censor speech that is deemed offensive or socially harmful. Some political progressives have taken this approach during recent decades to argue in favor of hate speech laws in the United States, though some free speech advocates deem hate speech laws to be unconstitutional. The prospect of combatting hate and harm has likewise motivated social media corporations to censor and regulate speech in online environments.

In an era when uninhibited expression is seen to be causing offense and harm, is free speech still something of value to society, or would society benefit from greater boundaries on speech? Who should be responsible for drawing and enforcing these boundaries? What implications would such boundaries have for politics, and for the speech rights of political dissidents?

A Q&A session with the audience followed the panelists' opening remarks and responses to each other.

This event was made possible thanks to funding awarded by the American Rescue Plan: Humanities Grants for Libraries. This is an initiative of the American Library Association (ALA) made possible with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) through the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021.

Speaker biographies:

Katherine Alejandra Cross is a Ph.D. candidate in Information Science at the University of Washington's School of Information, where she studies the causes and dynamics of online abuse and how platform affordances shape social interaction online. Katherine is a widely sought-after critic who has written extensively about online culture, social media, and video gaming. For the last decade, Katherine has written about and researched the ways social media impacts free expression and has intervened in many debates about online speech, content moderation, and their relationship to acts of aggression in the physical world.

Jamal Greene is the Dwight Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, where he teaches courses in constitutional law, comparative constitutional law, and the law of the political process. He is the author of How Rights Went Wrong: Why Our Obsession With Rights Is Tearing America Apart, as well as numerous articles and book chapters on constitutional law and theory. He is also a co-chair of the Oversight Board, an independent body that reviews content moderation decisions on Facebook and Instagram. He served as a law clerk to the Honorable Guido Calabresi on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and for the Honorable John Paul Stevens on the U.S. Supreme Court. He earned his J.D. from Yale Law School in 2005 and his A.B. from Harvard College in 1999.

Eric Heinze is Professor of Law & Humanities at the University of London. After earning his JD degree cum laude from Harvard Law School, Eric published his first book entitled Sexual Orientation: A Human Right. Since that time he has published eight books and has authored or been interviewed for over 150 scholarly and media pieces. His two most recent books are about free speech. This past April he published a book with The MIT Press entitled The Most Human Right: Why Free Speech is Everything, and in 2016 he published Hate Speech and Democratic Citizenship with Oxford University Press. In addition to teaching and research, he has advised several inter-governmental and non-governmental organizations on human rights.

New York Law School Professor Emerita Nadine Strossen, past national President of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1991 to 2008, is a Senior Fellow with FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, and she is a leading expert and frequent speaker/media commentator on constitutional law and civil liberties. She has testified before Congress on multiple occasions.  She serves on the advisory boards of the ACLU, Academic Freedom Alliance, Heterodox Academy, and National Coalition Against Censorship.  The National Law Journal has named Strossen one of America’s "100 Most Influential Lawyers.”  Her 2018 book HATE: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship has been selected as the “Common Read” by Washington University in 2019 and Washburn University in 2022.