Forum on the Humanities and the Public World

Robert Post, David Boies Professor of Law at Yale University
“Religion and Freedom of Speech: Cartoons and Controversies”

Tuesday, March 13, 2007 | 7:30 pm | Lipman Room, Barrows Hall
with a follow-up panel discussion on Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Robert Post is David Boies Professor of Law at Yale University and this year’s Una’s Lecturer in the Humanities at the Townsend Center. His subject areas are constitutional law, the first amendment, legal history, and affirmative action. He is the author of Constitutional Domains: Democracy, Community, Management and the co-author of Prejudicial Appearances: The Logic of American Antidiscrimination Law. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies, and he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Law Institute. Before teaching at Yale, Post taught at UC Berkeley. Post was a law clerk to Justice William J. Brennan Jr. of the U.S. Supreme Court. He earned a B.A. and a Ph.D. in the history of American civilization from Harvard University, and a J.D. from Yale Law School.

About the lecture: Although freedom of speech is necessary for democracy, democratic states nevertheless legitimately and routinely regulate speech. There is an enduring tension between democracy’s need for a free and open public sphere and democracy’s need to protect dignity and ensure civility. In recent years, this tension has been prominently featured in European controversies concerning the publication of possibly blasphemous and Islamophobic Danish cartoons. Post will discuss these controversies with particular attention to how the law in Europe and America has sought to reconcile maintaining a democratic public sphere with protecting religious truths and sensibilities.

Follow-up Panel Discussants: Robert Post, Deniz Göktürk (Department of German), David Hollinger (Department of History), and Saba Mahmood (Department of Anthropology). Moderated by Anthony J. Cascardi (Director of the Townsend Center).