UHLC Nota Bene

As a professor at New York Law School and a former president of the ACLU, Nadine Strossen has spent much of her career writing and speaking about constitutional law and civil liberties. Her latest book, HATE: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship , draws on her decades of experience with these issues to present a thoroughly researched and strongly argued case against hate speech laws. As Strossen points out in her introduction, much of the controversy over the regulation of “hate speech” is rooted in the lack of a clear definition of the term, along with widespread confusion about what kinds of speech are protected by the First Amendment and what kinds of speech are punishable. She therefore begins by laying out two of the core constitutional principles at issue: viewpoint neutrality and the emergency test. Viewpoint neutrality is defined as the principle that government may not regulate speech “solely because the speech’s message, idea, or viewpoint is disfavore...

Children's rights are the human rights of children with particular attention to the rights of special protection and care afforded to minors. The law library has recently added to its collection Children's Rights: New Issues, New Themes and New Perspectives . The volume, edited by Michael Freeman, includes a collection of chapters authored by children's rights excerpts across the globe, each discussing current issues and developments in the law of children's rights. The collection of essays were brought together for the 25th Anniversary of The International Journal of Children's Rights , a leading journal in the field.  A key development in the law of Children's Rights was the ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) by 140 countries (with the notable and glaring exception of the United States. The CRC, effective since 1990, protects certain rights of children (humans younger than 18, unless otherwise defined by a nation...