Alan Dershowitz Quotes
Censorship laws are blunt instruments, not sharp scalpels. Once enacted, they are easily misapplied to merely unpopular or only marginally dangerous speech.
Alan Dershowitz, Constitutional Law Scholar and Professor of Law Finding, Framing, and Hanging Jefferson: A Lost Letter, a Remarkable Discovery, and Freedom of Speech in an Age of Terrorism, 2008
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Arguing agaist libel and sedition prosecutions:
In WWI Congress had passed a law that prohibited anyone from undermining or interfering with the war effort. The defendants had passed out anti-war literature to young men heading for military service. The court then overlooked the First Amendment and came up with a strange logic where the “clear and present danger” was the test of whether the First Amendment would apply. The anti war pamphleteers went to jail. Today, we look back on this and find it very surprising but this is yet another example of erosion of freedom and civil liberties when the nation is at war. By the 1950s, the Supreme Court had reversed itself and the First Amendment was restored to its original intent.
This became a critically important quotation a half century after it was made. Judge Hand articulated the majority Western and Judeo-Christian value proposition between dissent and heresy. However, for the majority of the Islamic world, the reverse represents the majority value that is held. There is a minority in the West that agrees that avoidance of heresy is paramount and a minority of the Muslim world that agrees that the protection of dissent is the more important value, but the two civilizations were at odds in the 20th and 21st centuries. However, Islam is about 600 years younger than Christianity. 600 years ago, the Christian world agreed with the Muslim society and prevention of heresy was the more important value. The Reformation and the enlightenment followed by the world example of America produced a transformation and this may occur in the majority of the Islamic world in time.
Alan Morton Dershowitz is an American lawyer known for his work in U.S. constitutional law and American criminal law, and for controversial political views.
