Presenters Ioanna Tourkochoriti
Jp Messina

Anna Chronopoulou/Tom Herrenberg (chair) Anna Chronopoulou/Tom Herrenberg (chair) This workshop examines historical and comparative aspects of the regulation of hate speech. Controversies surrounding provocative expression date back over millennia, even if the phrase “hate speech” entered the legal lexicon only in recent decades. Today, the rise of online media, along with global surges in populist political and social movements, have turned hate speech into one of the world’s most bitterly disputed social problems. Electronic platforms are now dominated by powerful yet opaque multinational corporations, meaning that questions about the extent of free expression no longer arise primarily between individual citizens and their national governments. These rapid changes have le our current regimes of transnational legal regulation looking murky and unpredictable. Experts overwhelmingly agree about the immorality of hate speech, yet disputes persist about its content, about the political and ethical legitimacy of legal limits, and about the practical efficacy of regulating speech. In our world of instant and incessant global communications, are bans on hate speech politically or ethically desirable, and, even if they are, do bans work in practice? Can they end up fanning the flames they were designed to extinguish? Our Special Workshops devoted to discussing (draft) chapters of the Oxford Handbook of Hate Speech, an interdisciplinary project that examines the most pressing issues surrounding hate speech, forthcoming with Oxford University Press in 2025.

Ioanna Tourkochori Hate speech and Holocaust denial
This presentation will examine new perspectives on longstanding questions about the legal regulation of Holocaust denial as a form of hate speech.

Eric Heinze & Tom Herrenberg Should universities censor more (or less) speech than the law requires?
How should higher education respond to legally mandated limits on hateful, discriminatory, or provocative speech? Should public universities fortify government rules in the name of equal dignity for vulnerable groups, by imposing even further restrictions of their own? Or should they oppose such restrictions in the name of free speech? Or should they do neither, seeking neither amplification nor repeal, instead simply joining in whatever the government status quo happens to be, as they would do with most other background legal rules? This presentation advocates the second position: through a brief examination of ‘no-platforming’ and ‘safe space’ policies, it is argued that, within fully-fledged democracies, viewpoint-selective censorship is always indefensible for higher education. Examples are drawn from high-profile controversies involving far-right speakers as well as pro- and anti-Israel speech. Viewpoint-based censorship generates one of two scenarios, neither of which coheres with the mission of higher education. One the one hand, noplatformers’ declared principles could never be applied with ethical coherence without becoming so broad as to require massive censorship. On the other hand, if those principles are to apply only rarely, then they lose internal consistency and become outright ad hoc impositions of campus decision-makers’ own political preferences.

JP Messina Informal responses to hate speech
Is hate speech free speech? If so, then we must tolerate it. If not, then not. But this is deceptively simple. The moral right to free speech plausibly constrains different agents in different ways. Whereas state agents are under particularly stringent dues to tolerate citizen speech, private individuals, groups, and corporations find themselves less constrained (with greater license to interfere). Or so I argue in the following three sections. I begin by clarifying the noon of hate speech, distinguishing it from nearby phenomena. Next, I ask: does the moral right to free speech cover hate speech, so defined? I will argue that answering this question is more difficult than it first appears and depends on distinguishing between different agents the right's correlative duty constrains. Finally, I'll argue that this provides a key for morally assessing informal responses to hate speech.