Henry Ford’s War on Jews and the Legal Battle Against Hate Speech

Researching Law, Vol. 23, No. 4

What is the relationship between the right to free speech and self-expression under the First Amendment and the government’s authority to limit speech it deems to be “hateful”? What is the relationship between hate speech that is directed at an individual and speech that targets the group to which that individual belongs?  This edition of Researching Law introduces a new book by ABF Research Professor Victoria Saker Woeste, who examines these and other questions in her new book, Henry Ford’s War on Jews and the Legal Battle Against Hate Speech (Stanford University Press, 2012), which tells the story of a Jewish lawyer, Aaron Sapiro, who sued automobile magnate Henry Ford for libel over antisemitic statements published about him in Ford’s newspaper, The Dearborn Independent.