Natural Language Versus the Fourth Amendment on Search

In doing the initial framing for an article on how to apply Helen Nissenbaum's theory of Contextual Integrity to the 4th Amendment, it has become apparent that there are differences between how natural language would classify whether something is a search, a reasonable search, or an excused or unexcused reasonable search, and how the law would classify the same action. Now this is not a mind-blowing observation, as it has been understood for some time that the fact of some things being classified as "not a search" for Fourth Amendment purposes is just kind of weird. However, I believe the differing categorizations of the two areas have implications when asking what an ideal Fourth Amendment doctrine would look like, so I'll explore that here.

The Nuremberg Defense of Racist Slurs

I'm sorry, but "I was just joking" is never really a defense when you use racist slurs. And it doesn't make you look like less of an idiot when you use them incorrectly, either:

South Carolina [Republican Jake Knotts] on Thursday called a Republican gubernatorial candidate of Indian descent a "raghead," saying we have one in the White House, we don't need one in the governor's mansion.
...
"If it had been recorded, the public would be able to hear firsthand that my 'raghead' comments about Obama and Haley were intended in jest," Knotts said in his statement. "Bear in mind that this is a freewheeling, anything-goes Internet radio show that is broadcast from a pub. It's like local political version of Saturday Night Live, which is actually where the joke came from."

First, even as bad as SNL has become, I somehow doubt this comparison is worth much. Second, if this is true about SNL originating the joke (which I'm not going to bother to check), it can probably safely be said that they are making fun of the racists, and that is the kind of joke that may be acceptable, if any is.

I'm not really sure why people think "I was just joking" is such a great defense. You're obviously not saying Obama and state Rep. Nikki Haley are literally wearing towels on their heads. And the only people that would think it's "funny" are also racist. So how does this help you?

Hate Speech and the Tea Party

(updated below)

Another post on language? Is this a theme? Ok, so I think about language a lot, perhaps as intertwined with the general concepts of speech and First Amendment rights. And judging from conservations with all other members of this blog, we'll go back and forth responding to similar ideas. Personally, I really struggle with that line on the First Amendment where hate speech falls - is it an action designed solely to injure? Is it political speech in any sense? Lately I've become more sympathetic to the Critical Race Theory approach, which is that hate speech is particular should be punishable in some way, but I'm still not sure. For all our liberal readers that have not yet explored the radical, Words That Wound is a collection of the seminal critical race essays on the subject, by Mari Matsuda, Kim Crenshaw, Richard Delgado, and Charles Lawrence III, and well worth the mind-opening read.

Anyway, so this post was prompted by that oh so wonderful new-ish political movement, the Tea Party, and protestors' decisions to call Rep. John Lewis one of the words Jacob says we should have removed from our vocabularies loooong ago, and call Rep. Barney Frank another. I agree completely with Jacob that we need to monitor our own speech and be conscious of the results of it, but the difficulty is in the next step - can law be involved?

The Appropriateness of Adjectival Nouns

Ok, so this is probably a slightly different subject from what many of my other posts will be, but I'm a huge linguistics nerd too, so I thought I'd kick it off with this, based on a discussion a few of us had a couple weeks ago.

So here's the main question: Is calling someone an "[adjective]" as a noun versus an "[adjective] person," inherently offensive labeling, or is this usage somewhat an accident of language? For example, we can all pretty much agree that calling someone a "schizophrenic" versus "a schizophrenic person" or "person with schizophrenia," is offensive, but is it always the case?