November 3, 2009 4:42PM # Obama, International Law, and Free Speech By [Tim Lynch](https://www.cato.org/people/tim-lynch) --- SHARE Stuart Taylor has a [very good article](http://www.nationaljournal.com/njmagazine/openingargument.php) this week about the Obama administration, international law, and free speech. This excerpt begins with a quote from Harold Koh, Obama’s top lawyer at the State Department: > “Our exceptional free-speech tradition can cause problems abroad, as, for example, may occur when hate speech is disseminated over the Internet.” The Supreme Court, suggested Koh — then a professor at Yale Law School — “can moderate these conflicts by applying more consistently the transnationalist approach to judicial interpretation” that he espouses. > > > Translation: Transnational law may sometimes trump the established interpretation of the First Amendment. This is the clear meaning of Koh’s writings, although he implied otherwise during his Senate confirmation hearing. > > > In my view, Obama should not take even a small step down the road toward bartering away our free-speech rights for the sake of international consensus. “Criticism of religion is the very measure of the guarantee of free speech,” as Jonathan Turley, a professor at George Washington University Law School, wrote in an October 19 *USA Today* op-ed. > > > Even European nations with much weaker free-speech traditions than ours were reportedly dismayed by the American cave-in to Islamic nations on “racial and religious stereotyping” and the rest. Read the [whole thing](http://www.nationaljournal.com/njmagazine/openingargument.php). ##### Related Tags [General](https://www.cato.org/general), [Constitutional Law](https://www.cato.org/constitutional-law), [Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies](https://www.cato.org/robert-levy-center-constitutional-studies) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).