In a country with such a strong commitment to free speech that even hate speech is constitutionally protected, the disparaging-trademarks provision is an anomaly.
A large proportion of the other advanced democracies in the world combine a commitment to free speech with rules prohibiting hate speech.
After a good deal of negotiation, Bollinger, who described his predicament to me as being caught between a commitment to free speech outside the academy and free speech inside it, instructed his new vice-president for arts and sciences and dean of faculty, the anthropologist Nicholas Dirks, to choose a committee to investigate the students' charges.
Loving your enemies certainly includes supporting the foundational commitment to free speech, and defending the right of free speech, even, or especially, for those who offend you.
Instead, the national commitment to free speech, he said, requires protection of "even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate".
LA Weekly's Amy Nicholson went so far as to describe the decision to pull the film as the end of free speech in Hollywood, writing, "Worse, we've hobbled our nation's commitment to free speech in ways we may never see: What scripts will nervous execs veto in fear of their own cyber assault?
Introducing Mr Irving, the president of the Union described his views as "despicable and abhorrent", adopting Columbia's "invite and insult" approach.So the Union honoured its avowed commitment to free speech (Harold Macmillan once described it, with perhaps a little hyperbole, as "the last bastion of free speech in the Western world").
In many other respects, this Court's commitment to free speech is admirable.
During the seventies, the left's commitment to free speech began to unravel.
The American commitment to free speech is the most robust in the world.
