Comparative Free Speech Jurisprudence

Syracuse University, Syracuse NY

Investigators

Abstract

This project assesses competing theories regarding the beneficiaries of judicial decisionmaking, via a cross-national examination of the claimants who have benefited from free expression decisions issued by a variety of courts around the world. The grant will fund a multi-site, collaborative collection of qualitative and quantitative data on approximately 2,000 constitutional or quasi-constitutional free expression decisions issued by the European Court of Human Rights and European Court of Justice; 10-12 leading national high courts, drawn from all regions of the constitutional world; and the 50 US state high courts. The research team will assemble a statistical dataset that will enable large-N analysis of those decisions with regard to types of speech claimant, nature of speech suppression, and patterns of judicial votes. The team will also assemble a documentary data collection for a subset of the cases, consisting of the published judicial decisions themselves and/or English-language summaries of those decisions, together with related primary source documents. This qualitative data collection will enable small- and medium-N analysis of the relevant decisions by members of the research team and other scholars. Data analysis will assess the political beneficiaries of rights-protecting judicial decisions across five commonly recurring categories of free speech disputes.