by Donald Alexander Downs (Author)

In 1977, a Chicago-based Nazi group announced its plans to demonstrate in Skokie, Illinois, the home of hundreds of Holocaust survivors. The shocked survivor community rose in protest and the issue went to court, with the ACLU defending the Nazis' right to free speech. The court ruled in the Nazis' favor. According to the "content neutrality doctrine" governing First Amendment jurisprudence, the Nazis' insults and villifications were "neutral"--not the issue, as far as the law was concerned. But to Downs, they are at issue. In Nazis in Skokie he challenges the doctrine of "content neutrality" and presents an argument for the minimal abridgment of free speech when that speech in intentionally harmful. Draawing on his interviews with participants in the conflict, Downs combines detailed social history with informed legal interpretation in a provocative examination of an abiding tension between individual freedom and community integrity, and between procedural and substantive justice.

Author Biography

Donald Downs is the Alexander Meiklejohn Professor of Political Science, Law, and Journalism at UW-Madison, and the Glenn B. and Cleone Orr Hawkins Professor of Political Science at the University. He is also the director and co-founder of the University's Wisconsin Center for the Study of Liberal Democracy (2007-present). In 2013, Downs received the national Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Academic Freedom Award for his defense of academic freedom and freedom of thought at UW-Madison and in higher education generally. Downs also won the University's 2014 Hilldale Award in the Social Studies for " A Distinguished Career at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Research, Teaching, and Service."

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