It's Kind Of Like He Supports The First Amendment Or Something

I'm usually not a big fan of Erwin Chemerinsky.  When Hugh Hewitt had an afternoon radio show, I'd listen to it on my drive home from work, and Chemerinsky was a weekly guest on constitutional law issues.  I always found his arguments weak, not well formed, and decidedly leftie.  I couldn't imagine how, with such poor reasoning skills, the man became a law school dean.  Seriously.

But on this issue he is absolutely right:

A law professor from the University of California – Berkeley’s law school recently urged students to “protect all speech,” including speech they find offensive and hateful.

“All ideas and views can be expressed on a college campus. Period,” Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the university’s law school, told students at Cornell University, according to The Cornell Daily Sun. “It’s very important to make the distinction between discussing what the current law is as opposed to discussing what we think the law should be.”

While allowing that there are exceptions to free speech—including ” inciteful language, fighting words and words that present a true threat”—Chermerinsky nevertheless told students that “hateful speech is protected by the First Amendment,” and that universities—public and private alike—“should allow the same level of free speech as their public counterparts.”

The dean suggested that students should “shift away from the common rhetoric of the term ‘hate speech’.”

“It’s important to separate the colloquial use of the term from the legal test that’s going to decide it,” he added.

Had I not listened to him for years on Hewitt's show,  I'd perhaps be a bigger fan after reading this.