Cambridge Legal Theory Discussion Group: 'A Dilemma for the Silencing Argument'

The first session of the Cambridge Legal theory Discussion Group will be held on Wednesday the 7th of November in the Moot Court Room of the Law Faculty at 5 pm.

This session will be chaired by Emma J Curren who will be presenting her paper entitled 'A Dilemma for the Silencing Argument'. The abstract is contained below. Sessions are pre-read and the full paper is available on Dropbox.

Abstract

In the debate surrounding the censorship of pornography, arguments from freedom of speech have been the presumptive resource of pornography’s defenders. Yet, a strain of argument in favour of censorship – the Silencing Argument – has emerged on the basis of pornography’s supposed silencing of women. This paper seeks firstly to outline Hornsby and Langton’s (1998) version of the Silencing Argument, before disproving the conditional which takes the argument from its empirical claim to its conclusion that a protected speech act has been rendered unspeakable. It will do so by establishing, by way of a counterexample, that the key linguistic claim on which the argument rests is false. The paper will proceed to assess the possibility of modifying the linguistic claim as to avoid the counterexample. It will, in turn, establish a dilemma which is generated by attempts to modify the linguistic claim, before concluding that such attempts are consequently fruitless.