April 05, 2012 6:45:24 PM by
Harvey Silverglate
My research assistant Daniel Schwartz and I just wrote a piece for Forbes.com about the absurd new Arizona anti-bullying law passed by the state legislature and awaiting Governor Jan Brewer's signature. The bill is just the latest in a series of federal and state laws that seek to ban protected speech by renaming it as something else, then outlawing it. The Arizona bill is a particularly clumsy example of this phenomenon, with the legislature crudely attempting to expand its anti-harassment law to prohibit any form of electronic communication that might be considered "annoying" or "offensive" to the recipient.
As we point out in our article, this bill would essentially criminalize the conduct of anyone who wishes to participate in any public forum. Pundits, too, should beware: from Rush Limbaugh to Bill Maher,those from both sides of the political spectrum who seek to provoke and offend via electronic communications would be liable to face criminal charges under this bill.
October 20, 2011 11:36:01 PM by
Harvey Silverglate
On October 11th, Yulia Tymoshenko, the former Prime Minister and would be President of Ukraine, was sentenced to 7 years in prison. Politicians, analysts, and reporters from Moscow, Russia, to Moscow, Missouri, have condemned her trial as an unjust farce. New York Times reporter Ellen Barry summed up many “western” views of the trial when she wrote that it would “lead Ukraine west, toward Europe, or into a tight symbiosis with the country’s Soviet-era masters in Moscow.” The consensus, of course, was that the guilty verdict has done the latter.
In our piece, Daniel R. Schwartz and I take a different view and argue that, while perhaps isolating the Ukraine politically, the trial itself demonstrates some striking similarities between our legal system and Ukraine’s. To convict Tymoshenko, politically-minded prosecutors cleverly utilized vague parts of the Ukrainian code of laws that were never designed to police her alleged behavior. As regular readers of my columns already know, the utilization of vague laws to convict the innocent is as American as apple pie (or, as it were, as Ukrainian as a nice bowl of Borsch).