Words that wound

Note from SCritLS:

In this book, Mari Matsuda offers a critical view of "free" speech. If you want to explore why the liberal/progressive commitment to defending all speech fails to satisfy in the face of rising white nationalism, pick this up. If you're interested in understanding more about why an originalist view of the First Amendment is limiting and often preserves the status quo, check out her work.

In this book, the authors, all legal scholars from the tradition of critical race theory start from the experience of injury from racist hate speech and develop a theory of the first amendment that recognizes such injuries. In their critique of "first amendment orthodoxy", the authors argue that only a history of racism can explain why defamation, invasion of privacy and fraud are exempt from free-speech guarantees but racist verbal assault is not.*