The Volokh Conspiracy

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Crime

Joyce Carol Oates: "It is delicate matter to adjudicate, even to oneself, where a literary/political sort of satire ends & something like 'hate crime' begins…"

|The Volokh Conspiracy |


That's what Oates tweeted today with regard to the Charlie Hebdo cartoons. Well, yes, it's delicate once you assume that speech that you see as religiously bigoted is a "crime."

But if you conclude - as American First Amendment law has rightly concluded - that expressing your views about politics or religion is not a crime, and that religions and members of religions are no more immune from criticism than any other ideologies, you've saved yourself a lot of "delicate … adjudicat[ion]."

Eugene Volokh is the Thomas M. Siebel Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, and the Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus and Distinguished Research Professor at UCLA School of Law. Naturally, his posts here (like the opinions of the other bloggers) are his own, and not endorsed by any institution.