Are hate-speech rules constitutional heresy?
Steven G. Gey’s article on hate-speech laws as being constitutional heresy failed to note that the framers constructed the Constitution to protect the rights of the minority from the power of the majority. Gey lost his scholarly objectivity when he wrote that free-speech laws will precipitate a growing restriction of free-speech in the US. Gey’s article against free-speech laws is similar to the debates regarding the separate-but-equal doctrine. In a recent article,(1) Steven Gey takes strenuous issue with proposals to regulate racist and misogynistic hate speech. Focusing on the work of Mari Matsuda, Charles Lawrence, and myself in the hate-speech area,(2) and Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin in the area of pornography regulation,(3) Gey mounts the most sustained…
