S3E3: The Complicated Right To Protest

As kids, we all heard someone tell us that it's wrong to lie...but as we grew older, we realized that people lie all the time. Politicians, presidents, and even executives at corporations tell lies—big and small. As citizens, there are obvious exceptions where lying is wrong, for instance; perjury, lying on your employment application, or lying to get a bank loan. But do we have a right to lie? And if so, what are the boundaries?

On this episode, we speak with UCLA Professor of Philosophy and Law Seana Shiffrin and George Washington University Professor of Law Catherine Ross. They discuss both the philosophical arguments against lying and the legal arguments against notorious lies made by President Trump and former Congressman George Santos.

We’re doing something special for this month’s episode. In October of 2023, we hosted a live recording here at the University of Chicago. Tom Ginsburg was joined on stage by renowned scholar Genevie Laikier to have a conversation about free speech on social media. In other words, it was very relevant to our current season about the right to free expression.

We’re going to share that recording with you this month. We hope you enjoy, and thanks to everyone who listened to our podcast this year.

Some might say one of the most important ways we exercise the right to free expression is through protests. And we’ve certainly seen groups all over the world using that right in the last few years, from the George Floyd protests in the U.S. to democratic marches in Hong Kong to demonstrations in Chile, Venezuela, Iran and Peru.

On the surface this right may seem straightforward, but there are many thorny questions to grapple with: when does a protest become a violent violation of other rights, what does it mean to protest in the age of surveillance, does the content of the protest matter for it to be protected?

We all know the phrase: “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” But is that actually true? Recent research in psychology has shown that words can cause a plethora of different harms. Should this make us re-think our approach to hate speech?

In the US we’ve been hesitant to regulate hate speech, while other countries have been incredibly stringent. Which approach is right, and why? And, how do we even define what hate speech is anyway?

To get some answers we sit down with Yale Professor Robert Post and Laura Beth Nielsen the Chair of the Department of Sociology at Northwestern University.

On the third season of Entitled, we're circling back to the first fundamental right: the freedom of speech. Lawyers and law professors Claudia Flores and Tom Ginsburg begin this season by peeling back the curtains of how this right is currently playing out at universities across the country. In recent years, there have been tensions — and intense clashes — around speakers invited to campus, what professors are allowed to say in the classroom, and what subject matter should even be allowed to be taught. Now, with many of these cases making their way to the courts, is free speech at universities entering a dangerous new era?

In this episode, they speak with Robert Post, Sterling Professor of Law at Yale Law School; and Ben Wizner, Director of the Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at the ACLU; and Komi Frey, Director of Faculty Outreach at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

On our last season, we focused entirely on the idea of equality from an international perspective. But when it comes to domestic questions of equality, or equity, they often focus on an important and specific topic: race. And one of the leading voices in that conversation is Dr. Ibram X. Kendi.

Kendi is most famous for his 2019 book "How To Be An Anti-racist". The book argues that the opposite of racism isn’t “not racist” but anti-racist. Meaning, rather than just being neutrally against racism you actively try to remove the inequality generated by racism and racism itself from society. This year he released a graphic novel version of his earlier history of slavery which is called "Stamped from the Beginning: A Graphic History of Racist Ideas in America"

Although we missed out on having Kendi on last season we thought, with the recent Supreme Court decision on affirmative action, that this was the perfect time to talk with him about how his views intersect with human rights, international law, the concept of the University and his thoughts on the recent case.

For the first time in decades, the future of abortion rights in the US is uncertain. With the overturning of Roe v Wade in 2022, The Supreme Court has forced Americans to reconsider and fight for a new vision of a right to abortion should be.

But it’s important to remember that debates about abortion don’t end at our borders. The end of Roe will have global ramifications for how other countries think about abortion rights but, as the US re-enters this international debate, are their lessons we can learn from how other countries have constituted, or failed to constitute, a right to abortion?

To find some answers we spoke with Julie Suk, a Professor of Law at Fordham University, Catalina Martinez Coral, Regional Director for Latin America and the Caribbean at the Center for Reproductive Rights, and Paola Bergallo, Professor of Law at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella.

In a world with personalized laws, each person would be subject to different legal rules and their own personally-tailored laws. For example, if you're a good driver, you could be rewarded for that good behavior with less stringent laws. Through this idea, and the acceleration of AI, technology could be used to comprehend our data from various places to create laws individual to us. These are some of the ideas that Omri Ben-Shahar writes about in his book, Personalized Law: Different Rules for Different People.

In this episode, we speak to Omri Ben-Shahar about the questions and concerns that personalized law presents, and how it could be used in the future. Ben-Shahar is professor of law at the University of Chicago, and Director of the Coase-Sandor Institute for Law and Economics. 

Animals suffer at the hands of humans every day. Not just in factory farms, but also in our homes, where pets don’t receive enough attention or exercise, and in our oceans, where humans disrupt their habitats and ecosystems. To what extent should animals have rights? In this special episode, we speak to world-leading philosopher Martha Nussbaum, professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, and author of Justice for Animals. Nussbaum expands her theory into why politics and law should redirect our ethical responsibilities towards animals.