A Comparative Study of the Constitutional Protection of Hate Speech in Canada and the United States: A Search for Explanations
William G. Buss · Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks · 1999
In any constitutional system that undertakes to give legal protection to freedom of speech, questions arise about the meaning of ‘speech’ and the scope of the freedom. One recurrent question is whether strongly negative statements about an individual or group, based on race or ethnic identity, are protected as ‘freedom of speech’. In this essay, I will treat such negative statements as ‘hate speech’, 1 and I will refer to the question of whether such messages are entitled to constitutional protection as the ‘hate speech problem’. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.