Freedom of Thought and the Struggle to End Slavery
2024 Baxter Lecturer: Keith Whittington
Whittington is the founding chair of the Academic Committee of the Academic Freedom Alliance and a Hoover Institution Visiting Fellow. He has been a John M. Olin Foundation Faculty Fellow, American Council of Learned Societies Junior Faculty Fellow, National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement Fellow, and a Visiting Scholar at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center. In the fall of 2020, he served as Visiting Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center and has previously been Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the University of Texas School of Law. He is a member of the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences and served on the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States.
A graduate of Yale and the University of Texas Austin, Whittington has also written extensively for a general audience in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Reason, and Lawfare. He blogs at the Volokh Conspiracy and is the host of The Academic Freedom Podcast.
Abstract: How did the struggle to end slavery connect to the fight for the freedom of speech? The abolitionists saw the success of their movement as a victory for free speech, as well as for human liberty generally. To them, free speech was a necessary adjunct to their goal of converting a small movement on the fringes of mainstream politics into a powerful political force that could shape public opinion and win democratic elections. Their opponents thought the same, and engaged in aggressive efforts to suppress and silence antislavery speakers and writers in the antebellum period. In this talk, Keith E. Whittington will discuss his work on constitutional history and free speech, noting that abolitionists celebrated the ultimate abolition of slavery as a victory for freedom of thought.