Tommy Raskin | The Libertarian Institute

War Resisters, Take Back the First Amendment!

by Tommy Raskin | Dec 23, 2020 | Featured Articles

The American antiwar movement has an illustrious history of peacefully highlighting and denouncing the criminality of our country’s military apparatus. From Henry David Thoreau’s tax resistance to the Mexican-American War, to SDS’s protests against the Vietnam War, to the progressive-libertarian marches against the Iraq War, the antiwar movement has long been on the frontlines of efforts to restore (or bring) rectitude to our republic by ending the state-sanctioned practice of mass murder. However, through its First Amendment jurisprudence, the Supreme Court has habitually stymied our...

Should We Ban Incitements to Violence?

by Tommy Raskin | Dec 20, 2020 | Featured Articles, Libertarianism

In 1969, the Supreme Court ruled in Brandenburg v. Ohio that incitements to “imminent lawless action” that are “likely to...produce such action” are constitutionally unprotected. States, therefore, can prohibit incitements without running afoul of the First Amendment. Was the Court’s ruling correct? Let us recall that the First Amendment prohibits the government from “abridging the freedom of speech.” Preventing speakers from inciting others to “imminent lawless action” means abridging speech. At first blush, then, the Court’s incitement doctrine seems unconstitutional. Then again, the Court...

An Anarchist Take on the Religious Clauses

by Tommy Raskin | Dec 15, 2020 | Featured Articles

The Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses bar Congress from establishing religions and interfering with free religious exercise. How should anarchists feel about that? Well, the first clause should positively thrill anarchists, what with anarchists’ well-documented skepticism of Congress’s “establishing” anything, let alone something as weighty as a religion! The second shouldn't seem so bad to anarchists, either, given that it limits state intrusions into people’s personal lives. The trouble is that the clauses, as applied, are often in tension, such that the satisfaction of one clause...

Compelled Speech and the Perils of ‘PruneYard v. Robins’

by Tommy Raskin | Oct 27, 2020 | Featured Articles, Justice

Humans are speakers. When we go to work, buy paintings, send birthday presents to friends, vote, and choose TV shows to watch at night, we don’t merely “do”—we say. We say what our preferences, ideals, and distastes are in the realms of commerce, art, love, and politics. But sometimes we show the world who we are by not speaking. By deliberately refraining from saying the Pledge of Allegiance, for example, we convey either disinterest in or opposition to what the flag represents. Thus, if our constant speaking serves an important expressive function, then our regular not speaking serves an...

The Irredeemable Racism of the Death Penalty

by Tommy Raskin | Jun 18, 2020 | Criminal Justice, Featured Articles

When confronted with overwhelming evidence of a discriminatory state practice, a decent society responds in one of two ways: by trying to remove discrimination from the practice, or by scrapping the practice altogether. In the context of capital punishment, the Supreme Court has opted affirmatively for the former course of action. In 1987, the Court in McCleskey v. Kemp expressed its hope and conviction that, even without a wholesale abolition of capital punishment, any troubling racism in executions was destined to end through Court-facilitated adjustments to the ultimate punishment. Nearly...

Antiwar Minarchism

by Tommy Raskin | Oct 19, 2016 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy, Libertarianism

This essay has two objectives. First, it will illustrate the differences between “minarchist” and “anarchist” understandings of international warfare. Second, it will demonstrate that international warfare generally violates minarchist principles. If it succeeds in this latter respect, devoted minarchists will finish this essay confident that they can and should protest militarism. Let’s begin with some definitions. Ayn Rand labeled government “an institution that holds the exclusive power to enforce certain rules of social conduct in a given geographical area.” Minarchists welcome this...