On Dissent Its Meaning in America

America values dissent. It tolerates, encourages and protects it. But what is this thing we value? That is a question never asked. 'Dissent' is treated as a known fact. For all that has been said about it - in books, articles, judicial opinions, and popular culture - it is remarkable that no one has devoted much, if any, ink to explaining what dissent is. No one has attempted to sketch its philosophical, linguistic, legal or cultural meanings or usages. There is a need to develop some clarity about this phenomenon, for not every difference of opinion, symbolic gesture, public activity in opposition to government policy, incitement to direct action, revolutionary effort or political assassination need be tagged dissent. In essence, we have no conceptual yardstick. It is just that measure of meaning that On Dissent offers.

1. From judicial dissent to peaceful protest; 2. From civil to uncivil disobedience; 3. The vagaries of violence; 4. Dissent, inc.; 5. Dissent and law's parameters.

Ronald K. L. Collins is the Harold S. Shefelman Scholar at the University of Washington Law School. Collins was a scholar at the Washington, DC, office of the First Amendment Center, where he wrote and lectured on freedom of expression, and where he is still a senior fellow. His journalistic writings on the First Amendment have appeared in Columbia Journalism Review, the New York Times and the Washington Post, among other publications. He is the book editor of SCOTUSblog. In addition to the books that he has co-authored with David Skover, Collins is the editor of Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Free Speech Reader (2010) and co-author with Sam Chaltain of We Must Not Be Afraid to Be Free (2011). His latest book is Nuanced Absolutism: Floyd Abrams and the First Amendment (2013).
David M. Skover is the Fredric C. Tausend Professor of Law at Seattle University School of Law. He teaches, writes and lectures in the fields of federal constitutional law, federal jurisdiction, mass communications theory and the First Amendment. Skover graduated from the Woodrow Wilson School of International and Domestic Affairs at Princeton University. He received his law degree from Yale Law School, where he was an editor of the Yale Law Journal. Thereafter, he served as a law clerk for Judge Jon O. Newman of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. In addition to the books that he has co-authored with Ronald Collins, he is the co-author with Pierre Schlag of Tactics of Legal Reasoning (1986).