Strum on the Legacy of Justice Brandeis

Philippa Strum, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, is publishing Speech and Democracy: The Legacy of Justice Brandeis Today (“Louis D. Brandeis 100: Then and Now” at Brandeis University, 2016). Here is the abstract.

Justice Louis D. Brandeis’s concurrence in Whitney v. California, later adopted by the U.S. Supreme Court, made American speech law the most permissive in the world. Its premise was that speech is crucial to the participation of Americans in democratic governance, and that the right to free speech was ineluctably tied to the responsibility of citizens to participate in the public sphere. Given both the relative lack of Americans’ involvement in the democratic process and the problems presented by hate speech and by Internet phenomena such as cyber-bullying, revenge porn, and terrorist recruitment, is the Brandeis formulation still relevant for the 21st century?

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.