Honors: Legal and philosophical perspectives on free speech and protest in France

This course addresses some of the ethical and political issues surrounding dissent and resistance, through a survey of classic and contemporary texts. The course is organized around the following interrelated units: 1) political legitimacy, political obligation, and anarchism (questions include: What justifies political authority? Do citizens have a moral duty to obey the law?); 2) civil disobedience, nonviolence, and revolution (What form should dissent and opposition take? What works?); 3) the ethics of defensive action, as applied to community self-defense, political rioting, and environmental direct action. Students relate philosophical debates to historical and contemporary cases of resistance, centering on France (the French Revolution; the Paris Commune; anti-Nazi resistance; ACT UP Paris; the Yellow Vests; Black Lives Matter and MeToo in France; and the 2022-2023 anti-pension reform movement).

The course offers a comparative study of the law regulating freedom of speech between the US and France/Europe. It tackles the different substantive rationales offered in defense of each regulatory system (democracy, autonomy) and the different forms of judicial reasoning deployed to apply the laws in question. Topics covered include, among others: freedom of the press; political dissent; defamation (including in MeToo context); blasphemy and religious offense (in context of liberal neutrality and “laïcité”); hate speech (including Holocaust denial); freedom of artistic expression (censorship, street art and vandalism); and online speech (lying, trolling).