Notes on Parrhesia

Abstract

1. In the United States, First Amendment law, particularly that pertaining to free speech, is grounded in the notion famously articulated by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1919, in his dissent in Abrams v. United States, that “the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.”1 The near-century of jurisprudence following Abrams has yielded robust protections for what Holmes called “the expression of opinions,” which received added support in the summer of 2008 with the passage, in the New York State Legislature, of the Libel Terrorism Reform Act. The act, dubbed “Rachel's Law” after Rachel Ehrenfeld, an American author who was sued in England, where several dozen copies of her US-published book had been sold over the internet, allows New York courts to block enforcement of libel judgments from countries with a lower standard of expressive freedom than ours.2 On September 25, 2008, the College Art Association sent a letter in support of US Senate bill S. 2977, The Free Speech Protection Act of 2008, to Senators Arlen Specter (R-PA), Patrick Leahy (D-VT), and members of the Senate Judiciary Committee.