Why liberals should hate "hate crime legislation"

Law and Philosophy

Volumn 20, Issue 2, 2001, Pages 215-232

  Hurd, Heidi M ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SAN DIEGO   (United States)

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EID: 0035606106     PISSN: 01675249     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1010661127873     Document Type: Article

References (11)

1. Paul Robinson, for example, has defended the claim that specific intent crimes provide adequate precedent for hate crimes (although he goes on to argue that while hate crimes enjoy such precedents, the use of hate motivation is not necessarily the best criterion for defining the harms that hate crimes seek to punish). See Paul H. Robinson, "Hate Crimes: Crimes of Motive, Character, or Group Terror?", Annual Survey of American Law 1992-93 (1992), pp. 606-609.
2. For a version of this collapse see Kent Greenawalt, "Reflections on Justifications for Defining Crimes by the Category of the Victim," 1992/93 Annual Survey of American Law, pp. 6120-6125.
3. This is assuming, as I am, that hate/bias crimes enhance punishments for otherwise punishable acts because of the subjective emotional or belief states within which the defendant acted (i.e., because of the defendant's relative culpability for those acts).
4. I do not embrace a utilitarian theory of punishment, so if this were the point of hate/bias crimes, my objections to them would exceed those articulated in this paper.
5. Alon Hard & Gideon Parchomovsky, "On Hate and Equality," Yale Law Journal 109 (1999), pp. 507, 513.
6. See Jeffrie G. Murphy, "Bias Crimes: What Do Haters Deserve?" Criminal Justice Ethics 11 (1992), pp. 20, 23.
7. Hard & Parchomovsky, "On Hate and Equality," supra, note 5, at p. 513.
8. For the already classic statement of contemporary liberalism, see John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). For one critique of this political vision, see Heidi M. Hurd, "The Levitation of Liberalism," Yale Law Journal 105 (1995), pp. 795-824.
9. For the already classic statement of contemporary liberalism, see John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). For one critique of this political vision, see Heidi M. Hurd, "The Levitation of Liberalism," Yale Law Journal 105 (1995), pp. 795-824.
10. Paul Robinson has interestingly argued that if the criminal law does not permit the punishment of bad character as it is expressed in vicious actions, those who are convinced that moral blameworthiness resides primarily in character may eventually force it to permit the punishment of bad character alone. In the interests of preserving an act-oriented system of criminal responsibility, we may do well to permit character-based penalty enhancements. Robinson, "Hate Crimes," supra, note 1, at 611.
11. For his defense of the morality of freedom, see Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), ch.'s 14 & 15.