As the law at present stands and works, I do not think I could even say of a candidate for the House of Commons that he was not likely to be more than a permanent back-bencher without having to pay heavily for my opinion.
Harold J. Laski
The Public Record
Harold Joseph Laski was an English political theorist and economist. He was active in politics and served as the chairman of the British Labour Party from 1945 to 1946 and was a professor at the London School of Economics from 1926 to 1950. He first promoted pluralism by emphasising the importance of local voluntary communities such as trade unions. After 1930, he began to emphasize the need for a workers' revolution, which he hinted might be violent. Laski's position angered Labour leaders who promised a nonviolent democratic transformation. Laski's position on democracy-threatening violence came under further attack from Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the 1945 UK general election, and the Labour Party had to disavow Laski, its own chairman.
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We have, for instance, got into the bad habit in England of thinking that the social position of the plaintiff is a measure of the damages he should receive; and it is well known that there are places where, for instance, a socialist could…
I am tempted to suggest that, criminal libel apart, it would be worth while considering the abolition of damages in all political or quasi-political cases, and the concentration, as an alternative, upon proper publicity for the form of…
I have myself sat on a jury in a political libel case of which I can only say that I was almost persuaded to doubt the validity of the jury-system altogether by the habits there displayed.
Where a political flavour enters into a case, it is difficult, and sometimes impossible, to persuade a jury to consider the issue on its merits.
Outrageous damages, which bear no measurable relation to anything, are often claimed and not seldom awarded.
It is, I think, reasonable to doubt whether the Anglo-American law of libel, in its present state, does not push too far the right of the individual citizen to be protected from comment.
The public interest in the habits of individuals is real, and we must be careful to give it its proper protection.
I ought not to be permitted to inflict unnecessary pain on any person unless there is relevant social welfare in that infliction.
But if Brown, for instance, is a candidate for public office, my view that he cheats his employer is directly relevant to the question of his fitness to be elected; and if I can prove that my view is true, it is in the public interest that…
I have not a right to create scandal because I find pleasure or profit in speaking ill of my neighbour.
I have not, I think, a right to suggest that Jones beats his wife, or that Brown continually cheats his employer, unless I can prove, first that the suggestions are true, and, second, that they have a definite public import.
But here I should emphasize my own belief that, broadly speaking, such freedom of expression as I have discussed means freedom to express one’s ideas on general subjects, on themes of public importance, rather than on the character of…
Suppression here means not the prohibition of the untrue or the unjust or the immoral, but of opinions unpleasing to those who exercise the censorship.
They confer power in a realm where qualifications for the exercise of power, and tests for its application, are, almost necessarily, non-existent.
They give excessive protection to old traditions; they make excessively difficult the entrance of new.
They are bad because they are incapable of commonsense application; there is never any possibility of a wise discrimination in their application.
They are bad because no one is wise or virtuous enough to stand in judgment upon what another man is to think or say or write.
They are bad because they exclude the general public from access to facts and ideas which are often of vital importance.
They are bad because they prevent necessary social ventilation.
I have denied that prohibitions arising from blasphemy or obscenity, or historical or social unfairness, have any justification.
They have to be interpreted in the light of our experience; and to suppress someone’s experience is to suppress someone’s personality, to impose upon him our view of what his life implies to the forcible exclusion of that in which alone he…
For facts, as William James said, are not born free and equal.
And does not that admission involve an unlimited freedom of expression in the interpretation of facts?
Is it not wisdom to begin by an admission of its many-sidedness?
Politicians like Harold J. Laski
