2005/01/01 by Frederick Schauer · 27 citations
Social Sciences · #Amendment #Criminal Law and Evidence #First amendment #Law #Law, Rights, and Freedoms #Legal Systems and Judicial Processes #Political science #Supreme court
paper · doi:10.2139/ssrn.668543
published in SSRN Electronic Journal (Elsevier BV)
crossref issued 2005/01/01 · crossref published 2005/01/01 · openalex publication_date 2005/01/01 · crossref created 2005/07/08 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · crossref deposited 2026/07/28 · crossref indexed 2026/07/28 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/04
As is increasingly apparent, the United States is a free speech and free press outlier. With respect to a large range of issues - defamation, hate speech, publication of information about ongoing legal proceedings, incitement to violence or illegal conduct, and many others - the United States stands alone, not only as compared to totalitarian states, but also in comparison with other open liberal constitutional democracies. The reasons for this divergence are common, but among the explanations are the complexities of the trans-national migration of legal and constitutional ideas, differential commitments to libertarian visions as a matter of basic political theory, differences in the constitutional text, differences in political and legal history, differences in the role of various interest groups, and differences in views about constitutionalism and the role of the courts. This paper attempts to explore in an explanatory but non-evaluative way the causes of American free speech exceptionalism.