07/29/2025
Continuing Legal Education Opportunity for Friends and Attorneys!!
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CENSORSHIP
This Friday, August 1, 2025, at 11:00 a.m., by First District Court of Appeals Judge Jennifer Kinsley.
Where? At the Original Montgomery Inn, 9440 Montgomery Road, Cincinnati, OH 45242.
Start Time: 11:00 a.m.
Why does the First Amendment protect speech that causes harm to disadvantaged persons and groups? And what value exists in protecting expression that embodies discriminatory ideas? Existing free speech paradigms fail to fully – or even adequately – answer these questions. In-stead, advocates for free expression almost exclusively justify robust speech protection based on the democratic ideals underlying the protection of political expression and the marketplace function of the First Amendment. These arguments implicitly acknowledge a normative set of values around the range of speech protected by the Constitution. But by focusing on the value intrinsic to the expression itself, these justifications often fail to acknowledge the harm caused by speech, on the one hand, and the countervailing psychological and collective harms that result when a person is censored on the other. Stated another way, these rationales for protecting free speech focus al-most exclusively on the internal theoretical, and not the external pragmatic, aspects of modern speech realities.
This Continuing Legal Education presentation posits a new basis for the protection of free expression that better embraces what we know today about the relationship of between speech and the human mind: that censoring expression leads to damaging psychological harm on the part of the speaker that, in the long-term, solidifies censored ideas. Following on previous work exploring the therapeutic attributes of enabling expressive outlets for those with a penchant towards anger and violence, this Article exposes the broader psychological truths about censorship and its counterproductive tendencies. Drawing on psychological reactance theory, which teaches that threats to freedom will produce internal motivation and, at times, outward action to restore the freedom, and scarcity theory, which posits that an unmet need detracts from bandwidth and reduces intellectual functioning, the Article demonstrates that attempts to censor free expression actually lead to greater fixation on the speech in question and reduced ability to consider other ideas. Censorship is therefore psychologically counterproductive. It contributes to idea entrenchment, viewpoint polarization, and reduced intellectual capacity, all outcomes which contradict the very bases upon which the First Amendment was supposedly founded.
END TIME – NOON FOLLOWED BY QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
Admission is $40 and covers everything - the cost of the CLE, a Montgomery Inn lunch, real handouts, and a 20% tip for the Montgomery Inn servers.
If you just cannot get away from the desk, you may also log in with ZOOM per the instructions below. If you do not need CLE credit, you can watch via Zoom for free! Facebook will not allow me to post a *.pdf document, so if you want to attend by Zoom, email [email protected] with the word HANDOUT/REGISTRATION in the subject for the material. Preregistration is NOT required, so just log into Zoom, pay attention, because the Ohio Supreme Court requires that, and send your registration and payment back to me to prove that you listened and voila, you get 1.0 hour of live webinar credit.
Here is the Zoom Link if you want to attend.
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86400221784?pwd=aklrc0xQbGRMMXZpQjRMTG5xYTRrZz09
We hope to see you there or on Zoom to learn about The Psychology of Censorship.
