The YTL Centre in Politics, Philosophy, and Law invites you to a lecture by Professor Frederick Schauer, David and Mary Harrison Distinguished Professor of Law, University of Virginia.

Title: 'On Liberty - The Case of Pornography'

Date: 7 February 2019 
Time: 6.00pm - 7.30pm
Venue: SW1.18, Somerset House East Wing, The Dickson Poon School of Law, King's College London, Strand Campus 

A drinks reception will follow the lecture.

Abstract:

A common error, possibly fostered by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty, is to assume that freedom of speech is closely connected with the idea of human liberty, autonomy, and self-expression. Using the example of pornography and debates about its definition and about its regulation, I argue that questions about freedom of speech are best understood in instrumental and pragmatic ways, unlike the non-instrumental and non-pragmatic questions about personal freedom as a basic human right.

Biography: Frederick Schauer is David and Mary Harrison Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Virginia. From 1990 to 2008 he was Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at Harvard University, and was previously professor of law at the University of Michigan. He has been visiting professor of law at the Columbia Law School, Fischel-Neil Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, Morton Distinguished Visiting Professor of the Humanities at Dartmouth College, distinguished visiting professor at the University of Toronto, visiting fellow at the Australian National University, distinguished visitor at New York University, and Eastman Professor and fellow of Balliol College at the University of Oxford.

A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Schauer is the author of The Law of Obscenity(BNA, 1976), Free Speech: A Philosophical Enquiry (Cambridge, 1982), Playing By the Rules: A Philosophical Examination of Rule-Based Decision-Making in Law and in Life (Clarendon/Oxford, 1991), Profiles, Probabilities, and Stereotypes (Harvard, 2003),Thinking Like a Lawyer: A New Introduction to Legal Reasoning (Harvard, 2009), and, most recently, The Force of Law (Harvard, 2015).

The editor of Karl Llewellyn,The Theory of Rules (Chicago, 2011), and a founding editor of the journal Legal Theory, he has been chair of the Section on Constitutional Law of the Association of American Law Schools and of the Committee on Philosophy and Law of the American Philosophical Association. In 2005 he wrote the foreword to the Harvard Law Review’s annual Supreme Court issue, and has written widely on freedom of expression, constitutional law and theory, evidence, legal reasoning and the philosophy of law. His books have been translated into Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Chinese and Turkish.

This event is open to the public and everybody is welcome to attend, though everyone must register.

Seats are allocated on a strictly first come, first served basis. 

If you find you can no longer attend please cancel your ticket registration, so that someone else can have your place.