Reminiscences

About the author Privacy policies, terms, and conditions In all of my courses that touch on freedom of expression, I have asked my students to discuss this question in my first class: "The President of a Canadian university said freedom of expression is 'Eurocentric' and leads to the suppression of minority groups. As such, it needs to be remade in the era of globalization. Do you agree? To what extent do you agree? If you don't, why not?" This usually comes after my explanation of the "natural law tradition," according to which there are universal, fundamental principles governing people in all societies and cultures who enjoy fundamental, innate natural rights based on these principles. Examples of fundamental rights are the rights to freedom of expression, life, and property.   As expected, students in general appreciate the natural law tradition and even expressly embrace it. However, some students agreed tha...

About the author Privacy policies, terms, and conditions We often hear people say "The enemy of our enemy is our friend." This seems to make good sense. In fact, it is a strategy frequently used during wartimes: countries that might not be on friendly terms form alliances to fight against a common enemy and these allies are "friends" against the bigger enemy. During peacetimes, this strategy is frequently used in politics. During the US Presidential Elections, for instance, some candidates, recognizing that they are losing out, typically withdraw from the race and express support for a remaining candidate whose position aligns with theirs more and/or whom they believe would benefit themselves (more) should he become the President. When only very few candidates are left, voters, fearing that their most dreaded candidate would win, typically vote for a strong contender whom they might not like very much in the hope that the latter ...

  About the author Privacy policies, terms, and conditions A couple of days ago, I introduced to my readers this formula by American legal scholar and economist Richard Posner. Economists do not care as much about the nature of rights, including the right to free speech, as about economic efficiency. A good law restricting certain expressions is good as long as the perceived harms of the expressions are greater than the costs of suppressing them. This seemingly complex formula isn't all that complex if you understand the reasoning: I want to embark on a more challenging and contentious endeavor this time, which is to study the economic efficiency of laws regulating the use of (gender) pronouns. As you may already know, some US states such as New York and most of Canada have added pronoun laws in their human rights codes or anti-discrimination laws. Whereas "misgendering" people--aka not addressing people by their preferred pronouns--b...

About the author Privacy policies, terms, and conditions American economist Richard Posner's economic formula on free speech can be highly useful in determining whether laws are good, which, from an economic perspective, means economically efficient.  It was inspired by Judge Learned Hand's simpler formula, which compares the harms of the expression (L), discounted by probability (P), to the costs of suppressing it (V, which is equivalent to the social values of the expression).  Posner improved Judge Learned Hand's formula by adding "legal error costs" (E) to the costs of suppressing the expression, given that it can be challenging to distinguish harmful expressions that need to be suppressed and good ones that are not meant to be suppressed. In addition, given that the foreseeable harms may not happen immediately and may instead take place over a long period, the harms, measured in dollar terms, need to be discounted to the...

About the author Privacy policies, terms, and conditions "Hate speech" isn't quite the same as "hate." Considering that "hate speech" is often abused by people without any legal knowledge, who tend conflate the term with "hate," the other day I preluded my lecture on hate speech with a short examination of "hate." I discussed a poem by William Blake, titled "The Poison Tree," which I emailed the students before our meeting. When people confront their hate and find outlets, the emotion is relieved. When people buries the hate, it does not disappear: it continues to grow. The person harboring the hate may even enjoy cultivating the feeling. The poison tree serves as a symbol of cultivated hate that would lead to disasters than if the hate had been confronted and relieved/released at an early stage. *** Hate as a human emotion is natural and moral.  To get rid of hate is to deprive humans...