THE INDISPENSABLE RIGHT

A vigorous defense of free speech, a right enshrined but often hobbled or outright abrogated.

The American nation was born in rage, writes legal scholar Turley, and rage has since often defined its politics. This is especially true today, in a “period of such public distemper where our most cherished institutions and rights are being questioned by both the left and the right.” By Turley’s account, speech that expresses that rage certainly falls within acceptable limits; it’s the litmus test of falsely yelling fire in a crowded theater that, among other tests, gauges whether speech is protected. Examining free speech from the time of Socrates on, the author analyzes its countless discontents: the Red Scare legislators, for instance, for whom agitating against the big bosses constituted sedition, judicial constraints against “fighting words,” and so on. On either side of the political divide today, calls for censorship and speech suppression are rampant. However, it’s in the academy in particular that the disdain for unfettered free speech comes through most clearly, and Turley’s examples are striking. “By declaring speech as harmful,” he writes of censorious academics, “they give themselves license to stop views from being expressed.” The author parses recent events through the lens of free-speech absolutism, concluding, for instance, that Trump was within his rights to call for his supporters to march on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021—where, of course, so many of them committed non-speech-related crimes of violence. (But what of Trump’s claim that he would pay the legal fees for anyone who assaulted protestors at his rallies?) “We have a right to rage,” Turley insists. However—and he might have emphasized this more—we also have the duty to keep speech from crossing into violence.

A smart book that invites argument—civil argument, that is, with good faith and tolerance.