Vox wrote The Supreme Court will defend your right to free speech if it agrees with you
"The study, by Professors Lee Epstein, Christopher Parker, and Jeffrey Segal, found that conservative justices were more likely to protect the speech of conservatives, and liberals were more likely to do so for liberal speakers. 'Justices are opportunistic free speechers,' the authors write. 'They are willing to turn back regulation of expression when the expression conforms to their values and uphold it when the expression and their preferences collide.'"
It took me a while to figure out this chart (even though there are only 4 data points).
Vox says "The chart shows that, in general, conservative justices are less likely to defend free speech than liberal ones — conservatives defend it in one-third of cases, and liberals defend it in about two-thirds. But justices from either group are much more likely to defend the speech of ideologically similar speakers, and less likely to defend the speech of ideological opponents."
My interpretation is different. To me, liberals like free speech, a little less if it's conservative, and conservatives don't' like free speech, and if you're a liberal, you're practically not allowed to speak at all (just 1/10 of the time).
2 comments:
Your showing your libral bias. You could equally read it as liberals will let liberals say just about anyting (9/10th of the time). It seems to me the spread is actually marginally higher for liberal justices showing them as more highly biased.
Is liking "free speech" liberal? I thought conservatives were supposed to like things explicitly in the constitution.
I'm usually impressed with the ACLU's support of any free speech, I wonder how they "voted" on these cases, as some kind of (biased) baseline.
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