[claudiawerner]

>is just a bad cope for people who truly do not believe in free speech

I don't think this is the case; there are theories which are highly skeptical of free speech, and they are easy to turn to; one doesn't have to give up much in order to be a free speech skeptic. Further, even in the United States, the country with the fewest restrictions of free speech, there are still several kinds of speech prohibited by law. I'm not aware of any theory, liberal or not, which argues for purely unrestricted speech. There are always caveats in every theory proposed, whether it relates to incitement of violence, child pornography, threatening letters, hate speech, or pornography.

[valvar]

It's good that you acknowledge your (or so I assume) skepticism of the concept as such. Pretending that the exceptions which do not relate to political speech are relevant or even interesting is almost in bad faith, however. Free speech is about political speech, and the expression of controversial views. Things which you cannot say which are non-political are curiosities, things for lawyers to get excited about. They are of no concern to those who actually care about freedom of speech and thought as such. But "hate speech", which you offhandedly list among other largely irrelevant forms of expression, should most certainly be covered by any serious definition of free speech. And that is the actual reason for why many find free speech so repulsive — it requires them to accept the expression of political views which are inimical to their own. This is of course not exclusive to that particular form of speech — I think history can provide plenty of similar examples.

[claudiawerner]

>It's good that you acknowledge your (or so I assume) skepticism of the concept as such.

Personally, I'm skeptical only to a philosophical level, as I am critical of both liberalism and the state, and in particular how the state would exercise its blunt power if free speech protections were weakened. In practical terms, I'm in favour of freedom of speech.

> Pretending that the exceptions which do not relate to political speech are relevant or even interesting is almost in bad faith, however.

My point was more to get accross the idea that there are political theories of free speech (actually implemented or not) which (1) have what is called a "free speech principle", that is, an explicit endorsement and guarantee, to some or any extent, of the right to speak freely (2) enshrine this principle into a law, or suggest that it should be enshrined.

>Things which you cannot say which are non-political are curiosities, things for lawyers to get excited about.

They're also interesting in philosophical thought experiments and determining the value and extents of free speech - most imporantly in the idea of consistency. If threatening letters are disallowed, for instance, what implications does this have, speaking in terms of principles, for more "interesting" sorts of speech? It may have no implications (according to one theory of justification) but it may have far-reaching implications for another.

>But "hate speech", which you offhandedly list among other largely irrelevant forms of expression, should most certainly be covered by any serious definition of free speech.

My point in listing the exceptions was to say that if there is some exception, any exception, it means the rule is not absolute, and caveats can be made under certain circumstances. For example, incitement to immediate and direct violence is often an "uninteresting" exception. This is because violence is a kind of harm. However, the law also recognizes various other forms of harm (such as psychological harms). Which harms should or shouldn't be included, and why?

The question that 1A scholars and political philosophers have tried to answer is what, precisely, the exceptions should be, what the existing exceptions may allow scope for (copyright infringement? child pornography? cyberbullying? obscenity? defamation? - by no means uninteresting), and in general, whether we should have a fundamental law to guarantee freedom of speech at all. I think they're valid questions, and I think that too often we take ideas such as free speech allowing hate speech (however those two things are defined[0]), or free speech being worth the cost of hate speech, for granted.

[0] To paraphrase Susan Brison, these are hard to define. That's okay, we can talk about it. We don't have to write the law before we can discuss whether there could be alaw.