LAW 570

Freedom of Speech in a Digitally Interconnected World

Law School

Recommended for route(s):

[ Academia ] [ Litigation ] [ Regulatory & Policy ] [ Transactional ] Business Law: Media, Entertainment, Sports

General course Description:

This course will examine differing national approaches to the regulation of speech and expression, aiming at a deeper understanding of the First Amendment and its values in today's context of global interconnectedness. Americans tend to underappreciate the extent to which the First Amendment, as interpreted by our federal courts, is exceptional, both in the scope of its protections and the peculiarity of its limitations and exceptions. We also tend to equate our expansive First Amendment with democracy, and censorship with dictatorship, whereas in practice nearly all other countries, including many vibrant democracies, have implemented regimes for speech regulation that are notably more restrictive than ours. To understand why, students in this course will engage in a critical, comparative examination of the major legal, cultural, religious, and political rationales put forth for limiting individual expression, and then examine how those rationales play out in real-world legal and extra-legal state systems and tactics. Our work will be broken into three parts. We'll start with a systematic look at the leading theories and justifications asserted to support state restrictions on citizen speech and press activities. We'll then delve into country case studies, including India, Germany, Thailand, Turkey, Australia, Iran, Russia, South Korea, France, and the UK. Finally, we'll assess the ability of conflicting national systems to coexist in the age of the Internet, which is both increasingly significant as a medium of individual and organized expression, and proving to be disruptive of traditional legal and non-legal state techniques for enforcing limitations.

Course Style: A Substantive/ Perspective course looks at law from an external or non-traditional standpoint.

Course Frequency: Varied, check w/ registrar

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