The Day Oliver Wendell Holmes Changed his Mind About Free Speech

Here is an illustration of why it is vitally important that we (sometimes) change our minds. This is an excerpt from the famous dissent of Oliver Wendell Holmes in the 1919 case of Abrams v The United States:

Persecution for the expression of opinions seems to me perfectly logical. If you have no doubt of your premises or your power, and want a certain result with all your heart, you naturally express your wishes in law, and sweep away all opposition. To allow opposition by speech seems to indicate that you think the speech impotent, as when a man says that he has squared the circle, or that you do not care wholeheartedly for the result, or that you doubt either your power or your premises.

But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas -- that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out.

That, at any rate, is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment. Every year, if not every day, we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge. While that experiment is part of our system, I think that we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death, unless they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is required to save the country.

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Violence Denialism Rampant in Philadelphia

Ray Arora reports the spiking numbers in Philadelphia crime and the urge to "fix" this problem by denying it. Arora's article appears at Glenn Loury's Substack:

Last week, Philadelphia district attorney Larry Krasner, a prominent criminal justice reform advocate, generated blistering backlash after explicitly dismissing the recent explosion of violent crime in his city:

“We don’t have a crisis of lawlessness, we don’t have a crisis of crime, we don’t have a crisis of violence,” the district attorney told reporters at a Monday press conference when asked if tourists are safe to travel to Philadelphia for the holidays. “It’s important that we don’t let this become mushy and bleed into the notion that there is some kind of big spike in crime.”

The crime stats tell a different story. As of Saturday night, the city tallied 535 homicides, shattering its record 500 homicides set in 1990, the height of the crack epidemic. This summer, the city reached another grim milestone: Philadelphia had the highest murder rate per capita of the country’s 10 largest cities.

Though progressive politicians dismiss growing crime concerns as right-wing “hysteria,” the homicide toll is nearly impossible to exaggerate. More people have died by homicide in Philadelphia in 2021 than in 2014 (248) and 2015 (280) combined. Moreover, the racial inequality in homicide victimization is striking: though black Americans comprise only 41.5% of Philadelphia’s population, they account for 85% of the city’s homicide victims.

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Mehdi Hasan: Set Aside Your Emotions and Understand Why the Prosecution of Julian Assange is an Attack on the First Amendment

MSNBC has often disappointed me over the years, but this commentary by Mehdi Hasan is excellent. There is a high principle at stake with regard to the prosecution of Julian Assange. Trump was wrong to bring the case and Biden is wrong to continue the prosecution. Obama’s DOJ was correct that there is no way to prosecute Assange without violating the First Amendment. As far as Assange’s allege hacking, Hasan correctly comments that the main witness to that claim has recanted, something not widely reported because it does not fit the narrative of most legacy news outlets. You might not like Assange, but that has nothing to do with the merits of his case. Numerous civil liberty organizations are horrified about the prosecution of Assange. If you support the prosecution merely because you think that Assange is “bad,” this is a good time to revisit the legal basis for your opinion.

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Princeton University Posing as a Critic

Excerpt of "Letter from Princeton Open Campus Coalition to Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber":

When university administrators speak officially on controversial matters of social importance, they must be cognizant of the fact that––as faculty at the University of Chicago recognized at the height of the Vietnam War––“[t]he university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic.”[1] If the university itself becomes the critic––which occurs when administrators qua administrators opine on controversial issues not bearing a tangible impact on the university’s ability to function––it diminishes the openness of an academic climate that would otherwise invite dissenters to engage boldly with their peers and colleagues. This truth led the University of Chicago’s Kalven Committee to recognize that institutional neutrality enables the “fullest freedom of its faculty and students as individuals to participate in political action…” [2] We believe that the institutional neutrality principle, so articulated, reasonably restricts university officials’ speaking in their official capacities.

Unfortunately, recent events at our University suggest that the neutrality principle has been dangerously dishonored. In the case of Dean Jamal’s November 20th statement regarding the Rittenhouse verdict, the significant factual errors (while embarrassing) are not the cause of our protest. [3] What motivates our letter is a concern about the implications of a University administrator, speaking in her official capacity, promulgating to an entire community of students her moral evaluation of the outcome of a highly publicized and controversial trial. Her doing so in effect places SPIA’s institutional support behind a particular position on a matter which, as it engages the interests of so many, should invite a vigorous and respectful conversation amongst students and faculty alike.

Instead, students and faculty are left to read that a Dean has adopted a definitive stance on a matter about which reasonable people of good will can and do disagree. Dean Jamal writes with a “heavy heart” as she decries the “incomprehensib[ility]” of a not-guilty verdict, labels the defendant a “minor vigilante,” and situates the alleged outrageousness of the trial’s outcome within the broader context of racial inequalities pervading “nearly every strand of the American fabric.”

Each of these features––the verdict, the alleged vigilantism, and the systemic racism claim––are the subjects of genuine debate among serious legal commentators and academics. Contrary to Dean Jamal’s forceful assessment that some of these issues––viz., the systemic racism allegation––are settled “without a doubt,” these topics occupy the debates of students, faculty, and the public at large. Though no one claims that Dean Jamal’s statement directly forces dissenting students to remain silent or to affirm what they do not believe, it is no stretch to conclude that the establishment of an institutional position tends to draw restrictive parameters around a dialogue that would be otherwise unfettered.

[Emphasis added]

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