Eric Heinze (Queen Mary University of London, School of Law) & Ashutosh Avinash Bhagwat (University of California, Davis – School of Law) have posted Do Hate Speech Bans Undermine Liberal Values? (Forthcoming in Eric Heinze, Natalie Alkiviadou, Tom Herrenberg, Sejal Parmar and Ioanna Tourkochoriti (eds), The Oxford Handbook on Hate Speech (Oxford University Press, 2026)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Liberals have long advocated free speech, yet centuries of philosophy and jurisprudence have yielded little agreement about how far this freedom should extend. Liberal principles admit a range of exceptions when hate speech is targeted at individual victims, but disagreements persist as to when more generalized communications can legitimately be penalized. This essay aims to apply liberal principles that best address the perennial conundrum of respecting individual freedom whilst avoiding unacceptable risks to others. It is argued that, subject to appropriate risk criteria, a liberal order should not penalize individual citizens for communicating general opinions to general audiences solely on grounds of those opinions’ offensive or provocative worldviews. Criteria are therefore proposed for assessing these countervailing risks, with particular attention to differences between live and online environments, as these differences give rise to several possible models.