Although still facing a myriad of social issues, three decades since the abolition of Apartheid have seen South Africa establishing itself as a liberal democracy with a highly respected judiciary. It boasts a progressive constitution with a robust Bill of Rights, which specifically includes the right to freedom of thought albeit as part of the right to freedom of religion, belief and opinion in Section 15. Relevant case law indicate that freedom of thought is not yet seen as a fundamental right on its own, but rather understood as part of the right to freedom of religion, or as some prefer, freedom from religion. At first glance it may seem that coercive proselytising, archaic witchcraft and blasphemy legislation comprise the main related issues. The chapter argues that this is too narrow an interpretation, and that the right also forms part and parcel of other fundamental rights such as equality, speech, and privacy. To that end, the chapter uses the four attributes of the right to freedom of thought as formulated by the Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief and considers to what extent, in aggregate, South Africa lives up to the ideal. It concludes that an enabling environment for freedom of thought not only exists, but has the potential to be further developed in South Africa.

This paper summarizes the United States’ legal framework governing Internet “platforms” that publish third-party content. It highlights three key features of U.S. law: the constitutional protections for free speech and press, the statutory immunity provided by 47 U.S.C. § 230 (“Section 230”), and the limits on state regulation of the Internet. It also discusses US efforts to impose mandatory transparency obligations on Internet “platforms.”

The world has muddled through with limited and ambiguous understandings of the scope of national jurisdiction in a number of private and public law areas. In order to reduce the barriers of legal difference in the field of platform responsibility, states may begin by reducing areas of overlapping application of law, by agreeing on rules of exclusive jurisdiction. They may also agree on rules of national treatment, most favored nation treatment, and proportionality, or they may agree to harmonize rules. These incursions on national regulatory autonomy will require detailed, sector-specific negotiations, recognizing both the importance of global communications, and the importance of national regulatory autonomy.

A broad consensus has emerged in recent years that although rumours, conspiracy theories and fabricated information are far from new, in the changed structure and operating mechanisms of the public sphere today we are faced with something much more challenging than anything to date, and the massive scale of this disinformation can even pose a threat to the foundations of democracy. However, the consensus extends only to this statement, and opinions differ considerably about the causes of the increased threat of disinformation, whom to blame for it, and the most effective means to counter it. From the perspective of freedom of speech, the picture is not uniform either, and there has been much debate about the most appropriate remedies. It is commonly argued, for example, that the free speech doctrine of the United States does not allow for effective legal action against disinformation, while in Europe there is much more room for manoeuvre at the disposal of the legislator.

In April 2023, the Government of India amended a set of regulations called the Information Technology Rules, which primarily dealt with issues around online intermediary liability and safe harbour. Until 2023, these rules required online intermediaries to take all reasonable efforts to ensure that ‘fake, false or misleading’ information was not published on their platforms. Previous iterations of these rules had already been challenged before the Indian courts for imposing a disproportionate burden on intermediaries, and having the effect of chilling online speech. Now, the 2023 Amendment went even further: it introduced an entity called a ‘Fact Check Unit’, to be created by the government. This government-created unit would flag information that – in its view – was ‘fake, false or misleading’ with respect to ‘the business of the central government’.

This chapter analyses the ways in which the government sought to respond to the mounting administrative and political pressures on the treason trials in 1946 and 1947 and how the courts adjudicated on a wide range of offences, gradually producing a vast corpus of verdicts against the backdrop of a rapidly changing political climate. By this stage, the legal apparatus was struggling with the workload and the trials were being subjected to increasing social and political scrutiny, with many groups now cautioning that the trials were too harsh. These pressures, coupled with the need for legal consistency, produced an enormous dilemma for the authorities in charge. The complex balancing act between legal consistency and political and societal change, this chapter argues, reflected how the initial consensus around the trials was beginning to collapse.

This chapter addresses symmetry’s implications for expressive freedom and religious liberty. Symmetry supports maintaining First Amendment law’s current focus on neutrality, notwithstanding emerging critiques that this approach lacks a strong historical foundation and unduly limits governmental regulation of offensive or dangerous ideas. At the same time, symmetric interpretation counsels against expanding the emerging “First Amendment Lochnerism” that threatens to extend constitutional protections for free expression into areas of economic and workplace regulation. A preference for symmetry also supports protecting religious groups, when possible, through more general protections for freedom of expressive association rather than through religion-specific constitutional doctrines. Although religious liberty may once have been a symmetric principle, today religion-specific protections risk placing constitutional law on one side of a fraught political divide over religion’s place in public life.

This chapter touches upon the very large topic of how individual rights interact with the police power. In what sense and to what degree do rights contravene state and local exercises of the police power? It is a shibboleth that regulatory power is constrained by rights. But this chapter interrogates these issues in more depth and detail, by discussing how rights claims are framed in connection with the police power and how the government’s assertions of power are circumscribed by particular doctrines and arguments in courts. Further, the chapter considers how the debate over the nature and content of so-called positive rights implicates the police power questions, questions concerning authority and content.

The harm principle sets a limit on the justified legal and social control of individuals. The principle also provides a widely accepted justification for such control. This chapter critically reviews John Stuart Mill’s understanding of the harm principle and the considerations he advanced in its support. It also draws on other discussions of the principle to assess its plausibility in general. Mill took the harm principle to be the sole ground for justified interference with the liberty of individuals, but less restrictive defenses of the principle are available. The content of the harm principle, on any of its formulations, is shaped by the characterization of harm that figures in it. A good characterization of harm should be both descriptively accurate and morally appealing, but these two desiderata can pull in opposing directions. This chapter argues that the characterization of harm that figures in the harm principle must advert to the grounds that justify the principle, but these grounds are multiple and can come into conflict. Mill presents both an autonomy argument and a social learning argument in support of the harm principle, but the ground of autonomy can speak in favor of interference in cases where the social learning argument speaks against it. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of harm, speech and offense.

This chapter provides a narrative account of my time as Chancellor of UC Berkeley, beginning with issues around the governance of public universities and the place of student protest. It covers issues of personal security, debates over tuition and funding, the crisis caused by major budget shortfalls, the struggle between Governor Jerry Brown and President (of the UC System) Janet Napolitano (former Secretary of Homeland Security and Governor of Arizona), football teams and academic performance, sexual assault among students, data science and the curriculum, the global strategy of the university, the plan for a Berkeley Global Campus, the legacy of the Free Speech Movement of 1964, controversy about the role of civility on college campus, budget cuts, institutional restructuring and change, resistance to change among faculty, sexual harassment, and ultimately the tension between administrative leadership and faculty life. It also covers controversies over the visits to campus of Milo Yiannopoulos, Ann Coulter, and Ben Shapiro and a fullscale riot on campus. It concludes with accounts of progress in data science, biomedical research, and recovery from budget woes.

The book concludes by examining reformers’ visions for political integration between metropole and colony, which required both the Indianization of the exclusive Indian Civil Service and parliamentary representation for taxed Indian subjects. These proposals, however, generated conflict within the East India Association and exposed fractures between the radical agitators and the retired officials who had begun to swamp the organization. Gesturing to the afterlife of India reformism, the epilogue further identifies the factors that led to the decay of East India Association’s intra-imperial network and offers a reexamination of the 1908 sedition trial of Indian nationalist B. G. Tilak in which the accused copiously referenced reformist polemic to legitimize his agitation.