Search results for ""author donald alexander downs""

Fresh empirical evidence of pornography's negative effects and the resurgence of feminist and conservative critiques have caused local, state, and federal officials to reassess the pornography issue. In The New Politics of Pornography, Donald Alexander Downs explores the contemporary antipornography movement and addresses difficult questions about the limits of free speech. Drawing on official transcripts and extensive interviews, Downs recreates and analyzes landmark cases in Minneapolis and Indianapolis. He argues persuasively that both conservative and liberal camps are often characterized by extreme intolerance which hampers open policy debate and may ultimately threaten our modern doctrine of free speech. Downs concludes with a balanced and nuanced discussion of what First Amendment protections pornography should be afforded. This provocative and interdisciplinary work will interest students of political science, women's studies, civil liberties, and constitutional law.

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In 1977, a Chicago-based Nazi group announced its plans to demonstrate in Skokie, Illinois, the home of hundreds of Holocaust survivors. The shocked survivor community rose in protest and the issue went to court, with the ACLU defending the Nazis’ right to free speech. The court ruled in the Nazis’ favor. According to the “content neutrality doctrine” governing First Amendment jurisprudence, the Nazis’ insults and villifications were “neutral”--not the issue, as far as the law was concerned. But to Downs, they are at issue. In Nazis in Skokie he challenges the doctrine of “content neutrality” and presents an argument for the minimal abridgment of free speech when that speech in intentionally harmful. Draawing on his interviews with participants in the conflict, Downs combines detailed social history with informed legal interpretation in a provocative examination of an abiding tension between individual freedom and community integrity, and between procedural and substantive justice.

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Donald Downs offers an analysis of the injustices behind the logic of battered woman syndrome, concluding that this very logic harms those it is trying to protect. The text argues that battered women often adopt heroic means of survival, retaining accurate, reasoned perceptions concerning the actions and intentions of their abusers, and to portray battered women as lacking reason and will undermines otherwise valid self-defence claims and hurts women more generally. Also explored in the work is the "Syndrome Society" more generally. The author asserts that justice can be achieved without stripping victims of reason and reponsibility - the very attributes that make citizenship possible.

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