Free Speech Law and the Pornography Debate

Download or read book Free Speech Law and the Pornography Debate written by Lynn Mills Eckert and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-06-26 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By examining the highly contested legal debate about the regulation of pornography through an epistemic lens, this book analyzes competing claims about the proper role of speech in our society, pornography’s harm, the relationship between speech and equality, and whether law should regulate and, if so, upon what grounds. In maintaining that inegalitarian pornography generates discursive effects, the book contends that law cannot simply adopt a libertarian approach to free speech. While inegalitarian pornography may not be determinative of gender inequality, it does contribute, reinforce, reflect and help maintain such unfairness. As a result, we can place reasonable gender-based regulations on inegalitarian pornography while upholding our most treasured commitments to dissident speech just as other liberal democracies with strong free speech traditions have done.