Fishing for the First Amendment
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Fishing for the First Amendment The First: How to Think About Hate Speech, Campus Speech, Religious Speech, Fake News, PostTruth, and Donald Trump, Stanley Fish, Atria/One Signal Publishers, 2019, pp. 228, $20.99 hardcover. Michael Rectenwald # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Stanley Fish’s The First: How to Think About Hate Speech, Campus Speech, Religious Speech, Fake News, Post-Truth, and Donald Trump is an extended argument against what he sees as mistakenly broad interpretations of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, as well as its misapplication to particular settings, especially the academy (Chapter 3), and, in the case of religious expression, the public sphere (Chapter 4). With this Michael Rectenwald is a retired professor of liberal studies at New York University, New York, NY 10003; [email protected]. He is the author of ten books, including Nineteenth-Century British Secularism: Science, Religion and Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), Academic Writing, Real World Topics (Broadview Press, 2015), and Global Secularisms in A Post-Secular Age (De Gruyter, 2015). A prominent spokesperson for academic freedom and free speech, he has published widely and has appeared in numerous national and international media venues.
provocative little book, the Floersheimer Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at Cardozo Law in New York, whom its website lauds as “one of this country’s leading public intellectuals, and a world-renowned literary theorist and legal scholar,”1 is bound to raise the hackles of free speech advocates both within the academy (however few they may be) and outside of it. Fish’s distinguished career as a literary critic, and his appointments in law at Duke University and Cardozo (despite having undertaken no formal legal education), make The First an intervention into the present-day free speech controversies that begs for our attention. Unfortunately, Fish’s new book does little to clarify the issues and in fact only compounds them by introducing a parade of specious homologies and straw man arguments. With his characteristic slipperiness, Fish is a sophisticated postmodern leftist who contrives convoluted arguments for proscribing expression that he doesn’t like. Chapter 1, “Why Censorship is a Precondition of Free Speech,” is perhaps the most annoying installment of the book, although later chapters surely vie for that distinction. Right out of the gate, 1 “Stanley Fish,” Stanley Cardozo Law, cardozo.yu.edu/directory/stanley-fish.
Reviews
Fish argues that free speech is anything but free. It has costs, both for those who speak, and for those whom it affects. Furthermore, it cannot really be defined. “As a concept,” Fish claims, “it [freedom of speech] refuses to sit still and remains elusive to the grasp no matter how closely and rigorously it is examined.” (1) Throughout, Fish confuses the actual protections enshrined in the First Amendment itself with his own vague and fuzzy postmodern-inflected interpretations of it. The effect is to delimit
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