Dean Steacy of the Canadian Human Rights Commission famously dismissed freedom of speech as “an American concept” he didn’t “value”.
What to make, then, of the Justice Minister’s new 50-page b*** j** for Section 13(1), in which the star expert on “hate speech” and all its works is an American prof named Alexander “To Dumb To Really Be Jewish” Tsesis?
An American prof whose only clients are the Department of Justice and… Ted “Negligent Homicide” Kennedy?
An American prof who, it turns out, is a third rate mind at best.
In response to emails from BlazingCatFur, one of Tsesis’s critics, Professor Anuj C. Desai, described Tsesis thusly. Remember: this is the man cited numerous times throughout the new “Shut Up, We Explained” Canadian government document defending “thought crime” laws, in which he is presented as some kind of expert. However:
I’m not aware of anyone else who has directly addressed Tsesis, in part because, as you imply, he is not particularly well-known here in the U.S. (…)
My principal argument is that Tsesis misunderstands one of the underlying bases of the “imminent harm” requirement in Brandenburg. Rather than being premised on a view that speech cannot cause long-term harm, Brandenburg‘s “imminent harm” requirement is designed primarily as a prophylactic rule to prevent government from using a long-term harm rationale to suppress speech based on the government’s view of truth. To support a law criminalizing speech, therefore, it is not enough to rely on the long-term harm that the speech can cause.
Nice. An expert who “misunderstands” his own country’s Supreme Court decisions is being used to prop up our own.
Ezra has more thoughts on this dude:
For some reason, [Anuj Desai] couldn’t find time to do what Tsesis brags about in his resume: writing the memorable A Snapshot into the life of a hobo, published in Xpressions. But not all of us are destined to soar with the eagles.
Meanwhile, The Bear Diaries tears into Tsesis too.
