Statewide Political Meeting Speech

Speech delivered at the Statewide Political Strategy Session, Columbus, OH, September 11, 1984.https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/vice_presidential_campaign_speeches_1984/1088/thumbnail.jp

State Speech and Political Liberalism

Jim Fleming and Linda McClain have written an impressive book on the responsible exercise of rights, which flows from prior writing by each.Their title, Ordered Liberty, is a bit of a misnomer, however. When one thinks of that phrase, one thinks of the ways in which we balance liberty against order, i.e., against security, police power, controlling the excesses of liberty. Responsibility in the exercise of rights is an aspect of how rights are orderly, but the major hard cases involving rights are hard because significant claims of harm are in play. Think of much of constitutional criminal procedure, free speech cases that are tough because speech causes serious harm, not because it doesnot, and abortion rights jurisprudence. Fleming and McClain have much to say about what it means to exercise rights responsibly, but little to say about the state\u27s claims of order in the sense of preventing or redressing serious harm to others

Stigmatized Words: A Defense of Political Correctness

The debate over political correctness and the repression of speech has experienced a resurgence in the 2016 election season. “Political correctness is killing people,” Senator Ted Cruz remarked in December 2015. This thesis explores the liberal justification for the repressing politically incorrect speech and challenges the association of expressive freedom with truth, a position linked to John Stuart Mill’s philosophy of liberty and George Orwell’s denunciation of political speech. Reflecting contemporary postmodern views on language and liberation, I ultimately defend political correctness as a way to reflect social stigmatization, render stigmatized words more visible, and enhance linguistic agency

Remembering Melville Nimmer: Some Cautionary Notes on Commercial Speech

This examination concerns itself with two main questions: what qualifies as commercial speech and how much protection does commercial speech enjoy under the First Amendment when compared to other forms of speech. The trend of the Court indicates that commercial speech enjoys protections similar to political speech

Political Discourse Analysis through Solving Problems of Graph Theory

In this article, we show how, using graph theory, we can make a content analysis of political discourse. Assumptions of this analysis are: • we have a corpus of speech of each party or candidate; • we consider that speech conveys economic, political, socio-cultural values, these taking the form of words or word families; • we consider that there are interdependences between the values of a political discourse; they are given by the co-occurrence of two values, as words in the text, within a well defined fragment, or they are determined by the internal logic of political discourse; • established links between values in a political speech have associated positive numbers indicating the "power" of those links; these "powers" are defined according to both the number of co-occurrences of values, and the internal logic of the discourse where they occur. In this context we intend to highlight the following: a) which is the dominant value in a political speech; b) which groups of values have ties between them and have no connection with the rest; c) which is the order in which political values should be set in order to obtain an equivalent but more synthetic speech compared to the already given one; d) which are the links between values that form the "core" political speech. To solve these problems, we shall use the Political Analyst program. After that, we shall present the concepts necessary to the understanding of the introductory graph theory, useful in understanding the analysis of the software and then the operation of the program. This paper extends the previous paper [6]graph theory, discourse analysis, political programs

Remembering Democracy in the Debate over Election Reform

In FEC v. Wisconsin Right to Life, Inc., the United States Supreme Court held that the federal Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act violated the First Amendment right to free speech because the statute restricted a form of political speech known as issue advocacy. In attempting to protect this right from government intrusion, however, the Court improperly excluded considerations of democracy from its free speech analysis. The opinion consequently misrepresented the nature of the right to free speech for two independent but related reasons. First, because preserving a well-functioning democracy is the primary reason free speech is protected, the right to free speech does not exist when it is not justified by-nor when it conflicts with-the interest in preserving a healthy democracy. Second, an inductive review of American history and law shows that democracy is an independent right. The Court was therefore responsible for determining whether the political speech in question conflicted with the right to democracy and adjudicating between these two rights. By explicitly deciding not to weigh the impact that issue advocacy has on democracy, the Court set the dangerous precedent that courts can decide free speech cases without considering whether the speech in question tramples on the interests and rights that define it and determine its scope

Legitimation and Strategic Maneuvering in the Political Field

This article combines a pragma-dialectical conception of argumentation, a sociological conception of legitimacy and a sociological theory of the political field. In particular, it draws on the theorization of the political field developed by Pierre Bourdieu and tries to determine what new insights into the concept of strategic maneuvering might be offered by a sociological analysis of the political field. I analyze a speech made by the President of Romania, Traian Băsescu, following his suspension by Parliament in April 2007. I suggest that the argument developed in this speech can be regarded as an example of adjudication and I discuss its specificity as an adjudication in the political field in an electoral campaign. I also try to relate legitimation as political strategy to strategic maneuvering oriented to meeting the contradictory demands of the political field, which I see—following Bourdieu—as involving a double political game, a game of democratic representation and a game of power