essays about freedom of contract

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2 Contracts, Promises and the Law of Obligations

Published: August 1990
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The conceptual apparatus which still dominates legal thinking is the apparatus of the nineteenth century. This influence extends not only to law itself, but also to the processes of thoughts and to language in political, moral, and philosophical debate. This chapter illustrates the conceptual framework of contract and its place in the law of obligations as a whole. It argues that that this conceptual apparatus is not based on any objective truths; rather, it is the result of the previous decade's heritage, created and moulded in the shadow of past movements and reflecting the values of yesterday. It further claims the need to recognize that many of the societal values today differ from the values of yesterday, and argues that revising concepts is necessary so that they conform more closely to the values of today and be more functional.

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Contracts Great Britain.">Great Britain.

Contract, Freedom of

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First Online: 30 December 2014
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Péter Cserne 2

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Freedom of contract is a principle of law, expressing three related ideas: parties should be free to choose their contracting partners (“party freedom”), to agree freely on the terms of their agreement (“term freedom”), and where agreements have been freely made, parties should be held to their bargains (“sanctity of contract”). This entry provides an overview of the economic justifications and limitations of this principle.

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Péter Cserne

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Jürgen Backhaus

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Cserne, P. (2014). Contract, Freedom of. In: Backhaus, J. (eds) Encyclopedia of Law and Economics. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7883-6_538-1

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The Essence of Freedom of Contract Essay

Introduction, legal description, liberalism and contract, preventative aspects, contemporary regulatory measures.

The concept of the freedom of contract is a highly unregulated area of legislation, which presents both a wide range of opportunities alongside issues. The given notion is an integral part of the law of contract, which means that it is highly critical and relevant in the commercial world since the interactions between parties can be dictated by the degree of freedom provided within a nation. The legal roots of the notion of freedom of contract are manifested in the ideals of liberalism and theoretical capitalism, where the former values individual freedom and the latter values marker efficiency and effectiveness. Both of these benefits can be achieved through freedom of contract laws, but it requires the absence of regulation in the given area to be fully functional, which explains why there is very little regulation in this regard. Although the current restrictions are minor, they mainly revolve around anti-trust laws and consumer protection laws. However, there are still certain downsides to the idea of freedom of contract, where some services can lead to the dehumanization of moral and ethical ideals. In addition, the negative aspects of freedom of contract are predatory businesses, which target vulnerable populations.

The freedom contract is a central concept of any capitalistic market system, which values its freedom and effectiveness. The main reason is that little to no regulation in this area can make the interactions among market entities efficient as well as be the cornerstone of democracy and freedom for the citizens. For example, Australian contract law, as many other such laws, is rooted in the English common law, which is partially accompanied by statutory protection laws (Johnson & Millar, 2021). It is stated that: “the basic principle of Australian contract law is freedom of contract, under which parties are at liberty to strike whatever bargain they choose” (Johnson & Millar, 2021, para. 1). In other words, the emphasis is put on the core idea of democratic freedom, where market parties are free to establish and determine the overall contract rules. In addition, one should be aware that there are little to no limitations on the freedom of contract laws, except third party involvements and exclusive trading, which contradicts the Competition and Consumer Act 2010, where the latter is designed to regulate any form of anti-trust provisions.

Moreover, one should also add that the concept of freedom of contract is an instance of the liberal conception of law, where the focus is put on opportunity equality rather than outcome equality. The liberal conception of law is an important aspect of liberalism, where the prioritization is put on providing procedural or operational fairness without putting much emphasis on the results (Swedberg, 2018). The given approach assumes that a person or individual can be considered as the most accurate and effective determiner of one’s preferences, wants, needs, and interests, where the government should play a little to no role or influence in this regard. The liberal law understands the fact that focusing on an outcome is a highly intricate and complicated process, which undermines one’s right to autonomy and freedom, and it also robs the market of its efficiency and effectiveness. In other words, the concept of freedom of contract is deeply rooted in the liberal view of the marker and citizens in general.

Many Western societies, and especially Australia, approaches the overall notion of the freedom of contract and capitalism in laissez-faire terms, where total freedom and non-engagement from the regulatory bodies are ensured. Historically, the idea cannot be traced to its origins of Anglo-Saxon legislative measures because it is a byproduct of the emergence of two major philosophical foundations, which are theoretical capitalism and classical liberalism (Swedberg, 2018). The key basic ingredient of these ideas is the fact that human activity is primarily dictated by his or her desire to achieve profit as the basis of self-interest, which is the key driving force under the capitalist market settings. Max Weber claims that the expectation of profit and the actions of an individual entity for self-interest promotion is a cornerstone of capitalist free market forces, which needs to be supplemented by the freedom of contract and negotiation (Swedberg, 2018). Therefore, the liberal ideas affected the development of the term profoundly, but theoretical capitalism also plays a vital role in this regard.

One should be aware that the freedom of contract can have a wide range of different countermeasures, which are designed to limit the overall influence and predominance of the given legal unit. For example, it is stated that: “Australian courts have struggled with balancing the broad statutory protections afforded to consumers and businesses whilst giving effect to the contractual bargains of well-advised, sophisticated commercial entities” (Bellas, McComish, Hickman, & Holloway, 2018, para. 1). However, it is also stated that the recent changes are indicating the overall shift towards statutory rights (Bellas et al., 2018). In other words, the current legal system is constantly changing dynamically, but these fluctuations in the approaches are still insignificant because this area of the law is still unregulated.

One of the main catalyzers of the specified shift is rooted in the countering aspect of the Australian Consumer Law or ACL, which seeks to invoke consumer protection statutory laws despite the ideals of the freedom of contract. Contracts can be created between consumers and product or service providers, where the freedom of contract dictates that both parties should be free to set the terms of the contract as well as establish all financial elements. However, large and sophisticated companies can leverage their expertise and knowledge to out-promote their self-interests and potentially deceive their clients to gain the upper hand and high levels of profitability.

Based on the previous assessments, it is clear that consumer protection laws are naturally in opposition to the freedom of contract laws because two parties seek to establish self-favoring conditions and terms of the contract. However, an individual consumer can be put in a disadvantageous position due to the other party being a large corporation, which is far more sophisticated in the overall comprehension of legal terms and one’s boundaries of individual rights.

Therefore, one might assume that this is an uphill battle for an individual consumer, which is why ACL’s presence is critical to ensure that there is some form of protection. However, the freedom of contract laws remains highly unregulated due to the fact that courts and legal institutions favour and defend the freedom of contract against the doctrine of preventative measures (Warnock, Weissman, & Armitage, 2018). Any push-back or restrictive alterations to the freedom of contract can lead to major ramifications and implications in the overall functionality of the market because parties will be able to utilize these new restrictions to cause market inefficiencies and clogging in the legal system. In other words, there is a strong reluctance to implement changes in the area of the freedom of contract laws because the latter requires the absence of regulations to thrive both functionally and structurally.

The idea of freedom of contract assumes that there will be little to no regulation to successfully operate within a specific market. One of the key aspects of laissez-faire economics is the fact that parties are free to negotiate and establish the terms and conditions of the contract without intervention from third-party forces. As it was stated previously, contemporary regulatory measures in Australia revolve around consumer protection and other statutory prevention laws and anti-trust laws. However, they are not specifically applied or outlined within the freedom of contract laws but rather exist as separate regulatory units, which can go as a contradictory law. In other words, there is still no extensive or even moderate regulatory presence in regards to the subject at hand because it requires the lack of regulatory measures to be effective. In addition, the court might be shifting their favor towards the prevention laws, but the general trend is still manifested in ensuring the freedom of contract.

However, one should be aware that the specified recent trend is a natural response to newly emerging limitations of the freedom of contract laws. One of the most extreme examples of such limitation is centered around the idea of gestational surrogacy, where parents, who are unable to conceive a child on their own, make a contract with a surrogate mother, who will carry and give birth to a child, which genetically belongs to the parents and not surrogate mother (Allen, 2018). Since this is a highly sensitive and ethically volatile subject, the concept of freedom of contract can be put to the test. There is an evident and direct argument that the lack of regulatory practices, which makes the freedom of contract functional, makes the bond between a mother and child inherently dehumanizing (Allen, 2018). In other words, one can see that a surrogate mother becomes a mere vessel for the child, despite their genetic differences.

It is important to note that genetics is not a primary determinant of the humanization of the bond between a child and mother. The main reason is that naturally born children within their natural mother’s womb are still carrying the different genetic makeup, which comes from the father. Therefore, the freedom on the contract might push the boundaries of ethical and moral connection between a surrogate mother and child to make them strangers who have nothing in common besides the pregnancy and surrogacy.

One can effortlessly observe that the given example shows the dehumanizing aspect of the freedom of contract, where the ideas of capitalistic market efficiency and individual freedom are put above deeply human values, such as the bond between mothers and children. The lack of extensive regulation can easily lead to highly unethical and immoral practices, where contracts focus on surrogate mothers as mere vessels or natural human 3D printers despite the fact that the process of pregnancy and birth is deeply emotional and psychologically interconnected.

One might also argue that the presented example is a mere exception, which can be tackled separately, but such occurrences are predominant in Australia and the world in general. One of the major problems of consumer protection efforts is the prevalence of predatory businesses, which abuse the freedom of contract laws to target vulnerable consumers (Consumer Action Law Centre, 2015). These include credit repair companies, for-profit debt negotiators, private car parks, and in-home sales (Consumer Action Law Centre, 2015). For example, the case of for-profit debt negotiators demonstrates that such companies promise to settle the debt at a lower amount, but the customer needs to pay a certain fee upfront. However, their contract does not specify they guarantee a successful settlement or negotiation, which means that they are likely to abandon their customers after receiving the fee.

Refusal to fulfill an agreement, refusal to fulfill an obligation, termination of an agreement unilaterally is also a form of unilateral transactions. However, in the first two cases, it may not necessarily be about the complete termination of the corresponding rights and obligations of the participants in the legal relationship. It is quite permissible to talk about changing the term for the execution of the contract while maintaining the legal fate of the contractual connection. If nevertheless, the result is the termination of the contract, then the mechanism of actions aimed at realizing this goal is not identical to actions related to the withdrawal from the contract.

In this regard, it is important, from the point of view of the order of execution, the question of what distinguishes actions to refuse to fulfill a contract or to refuse to fulfill an obligation from actions to terminate a contract unilaterally. It seems to the author that those rules that establish the right to freely withdraw from the contract, and those that are aimed at protecting the rights of a bona fide counterparty by applying an operational sanction in the form of withdrawal from the contract, should be indicated through a combination of withdrawal from the contract. Other norms that are not focused on a failure in relations between counterparties, as well as norms that allow one to demand termination of the contract unilaterally through the court, should contain the concept of termination of the contract. Such certainty of legal norms will allow minimizing technical and legal errors that complicate the implementation of the principle of freedom of contract in the process of law enforcement and law enforcement.

Freedom of contract is one of the basic principles of civil law. Characterizing the principles of freedom of contract, it is necessary to proceed from the fact that the adequacy of understanding and analysis of the functional role of this principle induce to look for its expression not only in the stages of formation of contractual relations, but also in the stages of the subsequent development of civil law relations based on the contract, and its change and termination. Hence, it is quite logical to assert that the expression of contractual freedom is also the endowment of the parties with a broad opportunity to determine the further fate of the contract. This is true since those who have the right to enter into a contract of their own free will should, in principle, be just as open to terminating it or changing certain contractual terms.

Therefore, the analysis of the beginning of the freedom of contract and its functional role, taking into account the dynamics of contractual relations, as well as the provision that freedom of contract presupposes the autonomy of will, the initiative of counterparties, both at the stage of establishing contractual relations and in the process of their implementation and termination, seems more reasoned. However, there is no absolute freedom at any of the listed stages, therefore the beginning of freedom of contract has quite justified restrictions. For them, in the form of the corresponding imperatives, not to infringe on the real freedom of contractors in contractual relations, it is required to clearly define the internal content of the categories. With the help of these restrictions established, the question is how far they can go and in what terms they can be expressed.

In conclusion, it is critical to understand the concept of freedom of contract that emerged as the joint development of theoretical capitalism and liberalistic ideas. The core notion lies in the fact that an individual is the best determiner of his or her interests and needs, which means that both individual freedom and market efficiency are achieved through the laws of the freedom of contract. However, there are evident limitations to the given idea, where the current measures include anti-trust laws and consumer protection laws. The concept of freedom of contract requires the absence of regulations to be functional and effective, but it comes with certain costs, such as predatory businesses and unethical practices.

Allen, A. A. (2018). Surrogacy and limitations to freedom of contract: Toward being more fully human. Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy . Web.

Bellas, S., McComish, S., Hickman, K., & Holloway, B. I. (2018). Australia: Statutory protections vs. freedom of contract: A shift in the balance? Mondaq . Web.

Consumer Action Law Centre. (2015). Discussion paper: Unfair trading and Australia’s consumer protection laws. Web.

Johnson, M., & Millar, J. (2021). Doing Business in Australia: Contract law. Clayton UTZ . Web.

Swedberg, R. (2018). Max Weber and the idea of economic sociology . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Warnock, D., Weissman, M., & Armitage, A. (2018). Freedom of contract trumps the doctrine of prevention. Norton Rose Fulbright . Web.

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Essay: Freedom to contract and implied contractual terms

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Contracts in modern day society are now consistently incorporated into what regulates “planned exchanges” and this can be seen as outdated due to consistent intervention to limit ‘freedom of contract’. A system of laissez-faire or “leave to do” and the idea that a person ought to have ‘freedom of contract’ with minimal state or judicial interference will be discussed as has been examined in recent cases. The basis of all contracts consists of the terms whether this is express or implied as express terms are stated either orally or in writing whereas implied terms are those applied by the courts or by statute as fact, law, custom or for trade usage and cannot be excluded in the formation of a contract . For parties to form contracts on their own terms they must be completely autonomous in their will to do so and the doctrine of ‘‘freedom of contract’’ was therefore established in the 19th century being adopted by the English judiciary . The point in which the ‘freedom of contract’ was first officially legally recognised was that in the case of Printing and Numerical Registering Co v Sampson (1875) . An agreement to sell all future rights for a patent and obtaining the right to exclude other from using, making or selling an invention had been tested in conflicting with public policy . Sir George Jessel, Master of the Rolls , held the contract was valid and that this was not against public policy. During this time, a consensus ad idem or a meeting of minds between parties in a contract had been consistently emphasised in the formation of contracts which meant that this reliance of intention was a belief in autonomous contracting. In turn, the ‘freedom of contract’ has been outdated as the sanctity of fairness is to be upheld as Sir George Jessel MR expressed that “you have this paramount public policy to consider that you are not lightly to interfere with this ‘freedom of contract’.” Even though the courts are unwilling to interfere with the parties’ freedom to contract, it still remains their duty to protect the inferior against their oppressors to guarantee equality of all parties in law. To tackle this, strict requirements have been imposed to monitor the development of contractual terms and by rejecting to incorporate terms that do not fulfil the criteria. This has been demonstrated in the case of Liverpool City Council v Irwin [1977] where a term was implied for the landlord to take reasonable care and maintain the common areas in the property. In turn, revealing more restrictions placed on parties in their freedom to contract. The individualist approach in our legal system developed the classical model of contracting embodying the French Civil Code into accepting and adopting the doctrine of ‘freedom of contract’ . Consumer contracts are entered in to so frequently in every day agreements that protection is required on both sides of agreement. This protection means that businesses contracting with consumers must abide by the Consumer Rights Act 2015 which therefore limits businesses to contract on their own terms as they must incorporate the CRA into their agreements. Thus, this supports the view that ‘freedom of contract’ has become outdated as parties are increasingly being limited in contracting freely without Parliamentary or judicial intervention. The introduction of consumer rights aimed to balance the bargaining power between the consumer and the business. To give the consumer more bargaining power, the CRA 2015 gives away specific freedoms which businesses used to have prior to unfair contract terms legislation . The CRA 2015 led to fairness in bargaining power through wages and labour conditions to ensure consistency with freedom in the economy demonstrates how legislation regulates contracting. This must be done in “good faith and fair dealing” as a manner categorised by “honesty, openness and consideration for the interests of the other party to the transaction or relationship in question” . As a result, certain terms have been made illegal and off limits to protect parties such misleading the consumer regarding the contract or their legal rights, deny all redress if a problem occurs or changing the terms of the contract after agreement of the terms. Not addressing exclusion clauses before or at the point a contract is being made also renders a contract void such as in the case of Olley v Marlborough Court [1949] where a hotel failed to mention they would not be taking responsibility for stolen or damaged personal belongings before or when the contract was being made and the contract was deemed void . This can again reinforce the courts’ power to interfere in contractual agreements meaning a lack of autonomy for parties forming agreement on their own terms. ‘Freedom of Contract’ was previously a highly-regarded idea and judges would not interfere if the two parties had freely agreed to the contract even if there was an onerous term in small print that was not brought to attention . It was simply not their role to judge the terms if the parties had agreed to them. But now the CRA 2015 has made it the court’s duty to judge the fairness of terms. The CRA limits ‘freedom of contract’ since the act mainly focuses on securing consumer rights and protection and this comes at a cost. Businesses involved in ‘business to consumer’ contracts are no longer free to contract on their own terms thus. If the L’Estrange v E Graucob [1934] case was decided after acts such as the Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977 and Sales of Goods Act 1979. It would have been decided differently since both acts give strict treatment to unfair terms whereas previously ‘freedom of contract’ was considered of utmost importance. But judicial and Parliamentary interference demonstrated a need to sacrifice ‘freedom of contract’ due to its threat to fairness. The judges deemed that the onerous terms were valid since the two parties had signed the contract thereby agreeing to all terms. This case demonstrated the ‘freedom of contract’ being upheld by the courts since L’Estrange’s claim was unsuccessful as the rule from this case was made that if a contract is signed, the person signing would become bound by its terms. It is apparent that fairness is prioritised much more than ‘freedom of contract’ is in the eyes of the law. In contrast, the case of Arnold v Britton and others [2015] is one that was decided after the UCTA 1977 that shows how court procedures have changed due to legislation and the courts no longer uphold the ‘freedom of contract’ like they used to. The courts said they will respect the clear, ordinary meaning of the terms of the contract over what makes sense commercially, therefore; signifying that if parties write their contract in a clear and comprehensive manner, the court will uphold their terms, unless legislation deems this unfair. Furthermore, Lord Bingham placed value on the issue of fairness distinguishing between “significant imbalance” and “good faith” as the courts question if contractors exploit the consumer’s “necessity, indigence, lack of experience, unfamiliarity with the subject matter of the contract, weak bargaining position” . These factors all relay back to freedom and procedural fairness when creating a binding arrangement within a contract. The basis of a contract consists of its express terms which allow parties to contract to lay out terms for a contract themselves. Legislation, however, now distinguishes between which rules are unfair and therefore illegal. This is assessed and carried out by the courts while utilising Schedule 2 the ‘Grey List’ of the UCTA [1977] aiding in identifying terms that are unconscionable such as limiting liability for death or personal injury, liability for faulty and misdescribed goods or digital content and liability for a failure to perform certain contractual obligatory acts This has been a method of introducing unfair terms into basic contracts but this can be argued to undermine the ‘freedom of contract’ due to its clear restrictions. Before, courts would usually only uphold express terms due to the doctrine of ‘‘freedom of contract’’ and all terms expressly stated would have previously guaranteed the ‘freedom of contract’, but now express contractual terms can be debated in court and weighted for fairness. The case of Parker v South Eastern Railway (1877) reveals a case regarding an exclusion clause where the court ruled that an individual cannot part from a contractual term since failing to read the contract, however, a party relying on an exclusion clause must take the practical initiative to make this clear for the customer. Usually, the law upholds exclusion clauses, no matter how unfair they were or whether were written in small print as demonstrated in this case. Therefore, judicial intervention has worked against the ‘freedom of contract’ here since the law states that a person may be bound as a result of an exemption clause in a contract even if the party has been oblivious of its content. On the other hand, then Denning LJ developed this idea in Spurling v Bradshaw and held that “some clauses which I have seen would need to be printed in red ink on the face of the document with a red hand pointing to it before the notice could be held to be sufficient” . The ‘red hand’ rule was seen as a rational improvement of the common law as it emulated the nature of the common-law system. This ‘red hand’ rule can be said to help preserve a fair balance between all parties in a contract The courts had recognised express contractual terms to be a turning point in dealing many cases individually using an interpretive approach such as in the case of Investors Compensation Scheme Ltd v West Bromwich Building Society [1998] . Lord Hoffmann set out five principles for interpretation given that emphasised that courts should interpret contracts in their contextual sense which should make it more clear what the parties intended by the contract . This, again, signifies a moment of change reinforcing the fact that the ‘freedom of contract’ was outdated since we can see that any ambiguity in a clause would be construed against what is called the ‘proferens’ , which is, the party that proposes a clause of the contract. Therefore, this rule encourages parties to draw up their clauses in an unambiguous and clear way and if they cannot do so the clause will ultimately be held ineffective. To contrast, there are three ways in which terms in a contract can be implied as fact, law, custom or through trade usage and various tests have been developed for implying factual terms into a contract. The business efficacy test applies when terms implied with common law practice and as long as they are “obvious and necessary” including they are “desirable and reasonable” also. The Moorcock (1889) case is an example of implied terms read in and added as a fact where the harbour authority had an obligation to let the ship owner know that there was rock instead of soft silt at the sea bed. Therefore, there was an implied term that the ship should be safe because without this essentially the business would not be a business. This term was implied under the business efficacy test because without it the contract could not be performed as the parties intended. In turn, the CRA 2015 also puts restrictions on ‘freedom of contract’ for the purposes of consumer protection. The UCTA 1977 doesn’t allow any attempts by a party of a contract to limit or exclude certain terms in a contract such as liability for negligence . In addition, terms including a cause of death or personal injury is automatically void by statute and automatically implied in to the contract . However, damage caused to or a loss of property under a contract must be reasonable . Another test was the officious bystander test applied in the case of Shirlaw v Southern Foundaries [1926] where an express provision had not been included in a contract even though it would have been an obvious term to include at the time of formation of the contract. Also, the case of Marks and Spencer plc v BNP Paribas Securities Services Trust Company Ltd [2015] reveals that a term will only be applied if it satisfies the test of business necessity . Consequently, implied terms can support the ‘freedom of contract’ as the courts will only imply a term when it is so obvious that it is obvious or only if it is absolutely necessary for the contract to work in business terms. In recent cases, such as Attorney General of Belize v Belize Telecom [2009], Lord Hoffmann states how implying terms does not actually improve anything new in the contract but acts as a tool to make sense of the existing terms therefore supporting the terms that the parties freely decided. Nonetheless, implied terms give the courts more power to skew the basis of the contract. Lord Hoffmann’s judgement in the case of Belize claimed that these tests do allow new terms to be implied therefore going against ‘freedom of contract’ as was argued otherwise. The theory of laissez-faire can be applied here in this recent case. In addition, judges extended their duties beyond interpretation and no longer considered the parties’ free intentions to be as important as factors such as reasonableness. Terms can also be implied by custom of a particular industry, trade customs or according to previous contracts between the same two parties. This is particularly has been outlined in the case of Hutton v Warren [1836] where the courts implied a term into a tenancy agreement providing compensation for the work and expenses undertaken in growing the crops. This was due to the fact that during the period this took place it was common practice for farming tenancies to contain clauses as such to protect parties in contracts. It could be argued that, implying terms by custom is a bigger violation of ‘freedom of contract’ since a party may decide they would not like to keep to custom and the court may decide otherwise.

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freedom Of Contract

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A person's freedom to enter a binding agreement on terms of his or her choice, without regulation by the state. Freedom to contract is often limited by the state through ...

From: freedom of contract in Australian Law Dictionary »

Subjects: Law

Academic Freedom Under Fire

By Louis Menand

Crowd protesting against the backdrop of a tower made of books

The congressional appearance last month by Nemat Shafik, the president of Columbia University, was a breathtaking “What was she thinking?” episode in the history of academic freedom. It was shocking to hear her negotiating with a member of Congress over disciplining two members of her own faculty, by name, for things they had written or said. The next day, in what appeared to be a signal to Congress, Shafik had more than a hundred students, many from Barnard, arrested by New York City police and booked for trespassing— on their own campus . But Columbia made their presence illegal by summarily suspending the protesters first. If you are a university official, you never want law-enforcement officers on your campus. Faculty particularly don’t like it. They regard the campus as their jurisdiction, and they have complained that the Columbia administration did not consult with them before ordering the arrests. Calling in law enforcement did not work at Berkeley in 1964, at Columbia in 1968, at Harvard in 1969, or at Kent State in 1970.

What’s more alarming than the arrests—after all, the students wanted to be arrested—is the matter of their suspensions. They had their I.D.s invalidated, and they have not been permitted to attend class, an astonishing disregard of the fact that although the students may have violated university policy, they are still students, whom Columbia and Barnard are committed to educating. You can’t educate people who cannot attend classes.

The right at stake in these events is that of academic freedom, a right that derives from the role the university plays in American life. Professors don’t work for politicians, they don’t work for trustees, and they don’t work for themselves. They work for the public. Their job is to produce scholarship and instruction that add to society’s store of knowledge. They commit themselves to doing this disinterestedly: that is, without regard to financial, partisan, or personal advantage. In exchange, society allows them to insulate themselves—and to some extent their students—against external interference in their affairs. It builds them a tower.

The concept originated in Germany—the German term is Lehrfreiheit , freedom to teach—and it was imported here in the late nineteenth century, along with the model, also German, of the research university, an educational institution in which the faculty produce scholarship and research. Since that time, it has been understood that academic freedom is the defining feature of the modern research university.

In nineteenth-century Germany, where universities were run by the government, academic freedom was a right against the state. It was needed because there was no First Amendment-style right to free speech. Lehrfreiheit protected what professors wrote and taught inside (although not outside) the academy. In the United States, where, after the Civil War, many research universities were built with private money—Chicago, Cornell, Hopkins, Stanford—the right was extended to protect professors from being fired for their views, whether expressed in the classroom or in the public square. The key event was the founding, in 1915, of the American Association of University Professors, which is, among other things, an academic-freedom watchdog.

Academic freedom is related to, but not the same as, freedom of speech in the First Amendment sense. In the public square, you can say or publish ignorant things, hateful things, in many cases false things, and the state cannot touch you. Academic freedom doesn’t work that way. Academic discourse is rigorously policed. It’s just that the police are professors.

Faculty members pass judgment on the work that their colleagues produce, and they decide whom to hire, whom to fire, and what to teach. They see that the norms of academic inquiry are observed. Those norms derive from the first great battle over academic freedom in the nineteenth century—science versus religion. The model of inquiry in the modern research university is secular and scientific. All views and all hypotheses must be fairly tested, and their success depends entirely on their ability to persuade by evidence and by rational argument. No a-priori judgments are permitted, and there is no appeal to a higher authority.

There are, therefore, all kinds of professional constraints on academic expression. The scholarship that academics publish has to be approved by their peers. The protocols of citation must be observed, ad-hominem arguments are not tolerated, unsubstantiated claims are dismissed, and so on. Although academics regard the word “orthodoxy” with horror, there is a lot of tacit orthodoxy in the university, as there is in any business. People who are trained alike tend to think alike. But, as long as academic judgments are made by consensus, not by fiat, and by experts, not by amateurs, it is assumed that the knowledge machine is operating fairly and efficiently. The public can trust the product.

All professions aspire to be self-governing, because their members believe that only fellow-professionals have the expertise needed to make judgments in their fields. But professionals also know that failures of self-regulation invite outside meddling. In the case of the university, it is in the faculty’s interest to run their institution equitably and competently. They need to be trusted to operate independently of public opinion. They need to keep the tower standing.

This is why the phenomenon that goes by the shorthand October 7th was a crisis for American higher education. The impression that some universities were not policing themselves competently, that their campuses were out of control, provided an opening to parties looking to affect the kind of knowledge that universities produce, who is allowed to produce it, and how it is taught—decisions that are traditionally the prerogative of the faculty. Politicians who want to chill certain kinds of academic expression think that they can do this by threatening to revoke a university’s tax-exempt status or tax its endowment. In the current political climate, it is not hard to imagine such things happening. If they did, it would be a straight-up abrogation of the social pact.

But would it be unconstitutional? What kind of right is the right to academic freedom? Is it a legal right or a moral one? This question, long a subject of scholarly contention, is addressed in not a small number of new books, notably, “ You Can’t Teach That! ” (Polity), by Keith E. Whittington; “ The Right to Learn ” (Beacon), edited by Valerie C. Johnson, Jennifer Ruth, and Ellen Schrecker; and “ All the Campus Lawyers ” (Harvard), by Louis H. Guard and Joyce P. Jacobsen.

The fate of academic freedom is also a concern in new books by two former university administrators: Derek Bok’s “ Attacking the Elites ” (Yale) and Nicholas B. Dirks’s “ City of Intellect ” (Cambridge). Bok is a former president of Harvard; Dirks was a chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley. The general sentiment in these books is that academic freedom is in peril and that it would not take much for universities to lose it.

Whittington, who says he is “on the political right,” is highly protective of academic freedom. He can see no reason why we would want politicians to dictate what can and cannot be studied and taught. It would be like putting a syllabus up to a popular vote every year. His book is concerned mainly with public colleges and universities (where some seventy per cent of American students are enrolled), since their faculties are public employees and state legislatures control their budgets. This also means, however, that their speech is protected by the First Amendment. Florida’s 2022 Individual Freedom Act, popularly known as the Stop WOKE Act, which prohibits the teaching in public educational institutions of ideas that some legislators define as “divisive,” was struck down, in part, by the Eleventh Circuit for being what it plainly is: viewpoint discrimination, which is barred by the First Amendment. (The power of states to dictate content in K-12 classrooms, on the other hand, is fairly well established.)

The Florida act was one of a hundred and forty educational gag orders passed by state legislatures in 2022; almost forty per cent of these targeted colleges and universities. The gag-order phenomenon is one of the topics covered in “The Right to Learn.” The volume’s editors argue that efforts such as these are worse than McCarthyism . McCarthyism went after individuals for their political beliefs; today, the targets are the curriculum and the classroom, the very bones of the educational system.

The editors see the defense of academic freedom as “inextricably linked to the larger struggle against the racial, gender, and other systems of oppression that continue to deform American life.” Given that disinterestedness is a central ingredient in the social pact, this view may not have universal appeal. But there are disciplines, or subfields within disciplines, in which professors (and students) understand their academic work as a form of political engagement. Academic freedom would seem to cover these cases (although not everyone would agree). What academic freedom would not cover is indoctrination, a violation of academic norms.

What about students? The student version of academic freedom is Lernfreiheit , the freedom to learn. This rule is a little harder to apply. Students don’t typically determine the curriculum, and they are usually passive subjects of a disciplinary regime called grading. Originally, “freedom to learn” referred simply to the freedom to choose one’s course of study. Now it gets invoked in the contexts of classroom speech, where instructors are witnessing a lot of self-censorship, and campus speech, where students chant, carry banners, and exercise civil disobedience.

Some students report that they don’t feel free to express their views, because what they say might be received as hurtful or offensive by other students, and instructors find themselves second-guessing the texts they assign, since students may refuse to engage with works that they find politically objectionable. Instructors worry about being anonymously reported and subjected to an institutional investigation. Instructors and students can also, needless to say, suffer trial by social media. These are not great working conditions for the knowledge business. You may lose the argument in an academic exchange, but you have to feel free, in the classroom, to have your say without sanction.

Commentators have blamed this situation on a system of “coddling” in which people who say that they feel “unsafe” just being in a room with someone they disagree with are given resources to demand that something be done about it. The institutional symbol (or scapegoat) for this culture is the campus office of diversity, equity, and inclusion (D.E.I.). State legislatures have taken steps to ban D.E.I. in public colleges and universities , and conservative critics of higher education are quite explicit that bringing down D.E.I. is a primary goal.

“All the Campus Lawyers” helpfully shows that the regime of “coddling” and D.E.I. was largely the creation of the federal government. Together, Title VI and Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, color, sex, religion, or national origin in programs and activities that receive federal funds, as most universities do. The Supreme Court recently (and somewhat surprisingly) ruled that Title VII covers sexual orientation and gender identity. Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 prohibits sex-based discrimination, including sexual harassment, in such programs and activities. In 2016, an expanded definition of “disability” was added to the Americans with Disabilities Act in response, in part, to advocacy on behalf of people with A.D.H.D. and learning disabilities. The act defines disability as a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more “major life activities,” and “writing” is now included as a major life activity.

For universities, these laws provide a potential cause of action at every turn. Students and employees who feel harassed, unsafe, or generally uncared for by virtue of their identities are entitled, under federal law, to make a complaint. The result is what Guard and Jacobsen call the “lawyerization of higher education.” Universities live in constant fear of being taken to court because someone was treated differently.

But it’s not the individuals accused of discriminatory conduct who are being sued. The laws do not apply to them. It’s the university itself. A group of women who said that they were sexually harassed by the Harvard professor John Comaroff are not suing Comaroff. They are suing Harvard, for a Title IX violation. (Comaroff has denied their allegations.) And when, in January, a group of Jewish students sued Harvard for “enabling antisemitism” on campus, they did so under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.

The pro-Palestinian demonstrators who created the conditions that the Jewish students allege are antisemitic are immunized by the First Amendment. “From the river to the sea” is a political slogan, classic protected speech. That is why Congress does not subpoena the demonstrators but goes after university presidents instead. The members of Congress who grilled Shafik want universities to punish demonstrators precisely because the government cannot.

Almost all instructors want open and robust discussion of controversial issues in their classrooms and on campus, because that is how academic inquiry works. No doubt university administrators want that as well. But the risks are not imaginary, and they arise, paradoxically, out of Congress’s desire to create a level playing field. Would you call the Civil Rights Act, Title IX, and the A.D.A. “coddling”? Probably not if you were Black or trans or had A.D.H.D. Professors often complain about bureaucratic bloat, but in a big university you need a large legal and administrative apparatus to insure compliance with the law, and you need a large student-life bureaucracy to instill feelings of, well, equity and inclusion. These are the goals that Congress envisioned when it passed those laws. The professoriat did not invent them.

As for diversity, that was a concept imposed on higher education by the Supreme Court. In 1978, in the case of Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the Court ruled that universities could consider an applicant’s race as a factor in admissions. The Justice who wrote the opinion, Lewis Powell, said that universities had this right as a matter of academic freedom, which he said was guaranteed by the First Amendment—the first time that the concept of academic freedom had been extended to insulate an entire institution, not just individual faculty members, from outside interference.

However, Powell said, there had to be a reasonable justification (in legal terms, a “compelling state interest”) for considering an applicant’s race, which would otherwise be barred by the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of “equal protection.” He rejected the argument that it was justified because it helped remedy past discrimination or because it would be socially desirable to increase the number of nonwhite doctors, lawyers, and chief executives. The only constitutionally acceptable justification for race-conscious admissions, he said, was diversity. A diverse student body was a legitimate educational goal and universities had a First Amendment right to pursue it.

Powell’s opinion was affirmed in 2003, in the case of Grutter v. Bollinger, and again in 2016, in the case of Fisher v. University of Texas. Both times, the Supreme Court said that race could be considered in admissions but only for the purpose of creating a diverse class, with the implicit understanding that diversity extends beyond race.

This means that when Harvard’s admissions case came before the Supreme Court, in 2022, Harvard and other universities had been promoting the educational value of diversity, and preaching it to students and faculty, for forty years. It was a way of preserving race-conscious admissions. In fact, it was the only way of preserving race-conscious admissions. And when the Court struck down the race-based admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, in 2023, it specifically rejected the very diversity rationale that it had initially prescribed and repeatedly approved. The concept of diversity, the Court now said, is insufficiently “measurable and concrete.” How can universities prove that racial diversity has the educational benefits that they claim it does? As for Powell’s ruling that academic freedom is a legal right constitutionally grounded in the First Amendment, the Court’s opinion completely ignored it.

“Diversity” is not as straightforward an educational good as it may seem. In the nineteen-twenties and thirties, for example, Harvard used “diversity” as a method for limiting the number of Jews it admitted. At the time, “diverse” meant geographically diverse, a student body with more Southerners and Midwesterners and fewer students from New York and New Jersey. It was affirmative action for Gentiles.

In other words, diversity can underwrite many agendas. Today, for example, there are demands that private universities be compelled to admit a socioeconomically diverse class or hire an ideologically diverse faculty. The fact that élite universities, like Harvard and Columbia, which enroll barely one per cent of all college students in the U.S., are being asked to fix social problems—wealth inequality, political polarization—that no one else can seem to fix is a chief subject of Bok’s “Attacking the Elites.” Bok clearly feels that these demands are unreasonable; Dirks, in “City of Intellect,” expresses a similar impatience. But both Bok and Dirks think that it would be unwise for universities to ignore such demands. Bok calls them “the burden of success.”

Diversity presents an educational challenge as well. If you are telling students that they were admitted in part because of their race, in the interest of viewpoint diversity, they may feel that they are expected to represent whatever viewpoints members of their racial group are presumed to have. Thinking this way is antithetical to a traditional aim of liberal education, which is to get students to think outside the box they were born in—or, these days, outside the boxes they checked on their applications. Liberal education is about questioning givens, not reaffirming them.

A university is a community, and everyone is there for the same reason—to learn. The community has every right to bar outside parties and to insist on norms of civility and respect, understanding that those ideals are not always immediately attainable. In most universities, physical confrontations, the targeting of individuals with threats or harassment, and the disruption of campus activities are explicitly proscribed. When the rules are violated, the best approach is for the community to find ways to police itself. But most forms of expression have to be tolerated. Tolerance is the price academics and students pay for the freedoms society has carved out for them.

Still, the fact remains that all the emphasis on diversity and inclusion did not prevent October 7th from becoming a powder keg. The real problem is that all these issues are playing out in the public eye, and universities are not skilled at public relations. Since 1964, they have been adapting to a legal environment created largely by Democratic Congresses and a Supreme Court still marginally liberal on racial issues. Now a different political regime is in the saddle, in Congress and on the Court, and there are few places left to hide.

Academic freedom is an understanding, not a law. It can’t just be invoked. It has to be asserted and defended. That’s why it’s so disheartening that leaders of great universities appear reluctant to speak up for the rights of independent inquiry and free expression for which Americans have fought. Even after Shafik offered up faculty sacrifices on the congressional altar and called in the N.Y.P.D., Republicans responded by demanding her resignation. If capitulation isn’t working, not much is lost by trying some defiance. ♦

An earlier version of this article misidentified the publisher of “All the Campus Lawyers.”

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The state of global press freedom in 10 numbers

This past Friday, May 3, was World Press Freedom Day. The date marks the anniversary of the Windhoek Declaration , a 1991 statement, named for the capital of Namibia, that asserted the need for “an independent and pluralistic African press.” As the UN puts it , the annual event is “a reminder to governments of the need to respect their commitment to press freedom,” but also “a day of reflection among media professionals about issues of press freedom and professional ethics,” as well as a chance to “pay tribute to journalists who have lost their lives in the line of duty.”

Each year, World Press Freedom Day brings with it a welter of statistics on the state of press freedom around the world—no few of them offered up by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) alone, in its influential World Press Freedom Index . (The index ranks 180 countries and territories worldwide from best to worst on press freedom, according to five indicators spanning political, economic, legislative, social, and security considerations.) Journalists, of course, do not live or work by statistics alone—and, as I’ve written before in this newsletter , press-freedom statistics are often contested, sometimes bitterly so, with the picture they paint depending, among other factors, on who we consider to be a journalist, what aspects of their experience we measure, and what aspects are even measurable in the first place.

Still, this picture can be revealing—and on this year’s World Press Freedom Day, it showed a global crisis for the press that, on numerous metrics, is only getting worse. Below are ten figures from this year’s World Press Freedom Day, what they show, and, sometimes, what they don’t.

At least 1… journalist was killed on World Press Freedom Day. According to Voice of America , Muhammad Siddique Mengal, the president of a local press club, was traveling in a car in Pakistan’s Balochistan Province when an assailant on a motorcycle attached a magnetic bomb to the vehicle, which blew up seconds later. The perpetrator has not been identified, but VOA notes that Balochistan “has lately experienced almost daily attacks mostly claimed by ethnic Baluch insurgents” and that the region is home to other militant groups; Pakistan’s security services have also been accused of attacking critics there. The killing came one day after the Committee to Protect Journalists raised the alarm about a series of recent death threats targeting Hamid Mir, a prominent Pakistani TV journalist (who has been attacked before, as I wrote in 2022 ). On Friday, Mir described Mengal’s killing as “a message to all independent journalists in Pakistan.”

3… journalists were called out by name in a statement that President Joe Biden issued to mark World Press Freedom Day : Austin Tice, an American journalist who was abducted in Syria in 2012 ; Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter jailed in Russia since last year ; and Alsu Kurmasheva, a journalist with the US-funded broadcaster Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty who is also in jail in Russia. (She is a dual US-Russian citizen.) Biden has repeatedly spoken the names of Tice and Gershkovich. By my count, this was only the third time that he has publicly mentioned Kurmasheva’s name—and the second time in less than a week, after he said, during remarks at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner , that Russian president Vladimir Putin should “release Evan and Alsu immediately.” This recent uptick is notable: as I reported recently , critics have argued that Biden’s administration could be doing more to highlight Kurmasheva’s case. Her husband told me that he would like to hear Biden say her name more often.

10… journalists worldwide are worthy of particularly urgent attention , according to the One Free Press Coalition, a collective of international news organizations that aims to highlight the cases of threatened media workers. The coalition launched its “10 Most Urgent” list in 2019 and updated it monthly; it apparently stopped doing so in 2022, but has just relaunched the list as an annual project pegged to World Press Freedom Day, according to its website. Gershkovich and Kurmasheva lead the latest list, which also draws attention to the plight of jailed reporters in Ethiopia, Hong Kong, Rwanda, and Myanmar. Also on the list are three journalists I’ve written about in this newsletter: José Rubén Zamora and Gustavo Gorriti —veteran muckrakers in Guatemala and Peru, respectively—as well as Shireen Abu Akleh , a Palestinian American reporter for Al Jazeera who was shot and killed while covering an Israeli raid in the occupied West Bank in 2022.

26… journalists’ deaths “in the line of work” have been condemned by UNESCO since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7 and Israel responded by bombarding Gaza. UNESCO cited this figure in a press release announcing that “Palestinian journalists covering Gaza” would collectively receive this year’s World Press Freedom Prize, an award given in honor of Guillermo Cano, a Colombian journalist who was assassinated outside his newspaper’s offices in 1986. In the same release, UNESCO attributed its Gaza figure to information from partner NGOs and said that it “is reviewing dozens of other cases.” Indeed, its figure is significantly lower than similar data maintained by various other groups; CPJ’s tally of media workers killed in the conflict currently stands at 97 , while the International Federation of Journalists’ (IFJ) tally stands at 109 and regional groups peg the total higher still. As I wrote recently , how this figure is calculated has been a source of controversy. As of last month, RSF’s tally stood at 105 , but the group had to that point only determined that 22 of those journalists were killed “in the course of their work”—a distinction that a Palestinian press group has blasted as tantamount to whitewashing Israeli crimes .

42… percent is the rate of increase in attacks on journalists and news outlets covering the environment in the past five years (compared with the prior five-year period) according to a new report produced by UNESCO . (The theme of this year’s World Press Freedom Day was “journalism and freedom of expression in the context of the current global environmental crisis.”) Earlier this year, UNESCO and the IFJ surveyed 905 environmental journalists in 129 countries, over 70 percent of whom said they had “suffered attacks, threats, or pressure” linked to their work. The report notes that such attacks have taken place in every region of the world, including Europe, where police have arrested reporters covering climate protests in the UK, France, Spain, Poland, and Sweden.

More than 50… percent of the world’s population now lives in countries colored red in RSF’s World Press Freedom Index —the group’s lowest classification, reflecting poor scores on its indicators and a “very serious” situation for press freedom. Only 36 countries out of 180 worldwide are in RSF’s red zone, but this figure is an increase on 31 last year and includes half of the world’s most populous countries—China, Russia, Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan—all of which (bar China) held or are holding elections this year. According to RSF, less than 8 percent of the world’s population now lives in places with “good” or “satisfactory” press freedom.

55… is the new ranking of the US on RSF’s index , a 10-place drop from last year and a lower ebb than it recorded at any point when Donald Trump was president. The US has not placed higher than 40th since 2013, and comparing placements on the index from year to year is not an exact science anyway. But the recent drop—which puts the US below various countries with notably hostile recent press-freedom climates, including Slovakia and Poland —nonetheless reflects what RSF describes as “major structural barriers to press freedom,” including economic struggles and declining public trust. Not that the US was the biggest dropper in the index this year: Slovakia, for example, is down 12 places, Niger 19, Argentina 26, and Burkina Faso 28. All four countries have seen recent changes of government, be they the result of elections or coups.

177… is the new ranking on the index of North Korea, that country’s highest placement in at least a decade—but still the world’s fourth worst country for press freedom overall. For five of the past ten years, including the past two, North Korea—which has a notoriously totalitarian approach toward independent journalism (and a more favorable one toward propagandistic cinema, as I wrote last year )—has been rock bottom of the index, with Eritrea occupying that rank most of the rest of the time. Eritrea is back at the bottom this year. But Syria has now also fallen below North Korea—as has Afghanistan, where the repression of journalists has “steadily intensified” since the Taliban seized power in 2021, as RSF puts it. Prior to that, the country had hovered around the 120 mark for the better part of a decade.

310… BBC World Service journalists are now working in exile, according to a figure that the broadcaster released to mark World Press Freedom Day. The figure has nearly doubled since 2020, a reflection of events since then in Afghanistan and Russia, as well as in Ethiopia and Myanmar. The BBC pulled most of its staff out of Afghanistan after the Taliban took power, and moved its Moscow team to neighboring Latvia after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 and simultaneously intensified its crackdown on the press. (Last month, Russian officials labeled a BBC reporter as a “foreign agent,” a designation intended to confer stigma and onerous bureaucratic requirements that is also at issue in Kurmasheva’s case .) Some BBC journalists who were already working from exile, meanwhile, have recently been on the receiving end of an uptick in threats—not least journalists working for BBC Persian, 10 of whom learned recently that they had secretly been convicted in absentia in their home country. Exiled Iranian journalists’ families have also been harassed, as I wrote recently .

2.5 billion… is the amount (in US dollars) that tax authorities in Turkey fined a media company that had been critical of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan—ostensibly on fraud charges, but actually, many critics suspected, as a political punishment. This happened in 2009, but on World Press Freedom Day last week, Jan-Werner Müller, a professor at Princeton, returned to the story to highlight the anti-press tactics to which repressive leaders (including Erdoğan, who was prime minister then and is now the president) have resorted in order to maintain at least a veneer of plausible deniability. “As another World Press Freedom Day arrives, news media organizations will dutifully display lists of journalists imprisoned or killed around the world,” Müller wrote in Foreign Policy . “It is important to acknowledge these victims. But it’s also time to recognize that analysts and policymakers need a new framework to understand how a new generation of authoritarian leaders disables critical coverage without putting journalists in jail or physically harming them.”

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Reality Show Contestants Compete for an Authoritarian’s Campaign Jingle

The program is one way President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela is trying portray himself and his allies as joyful, colorful characters determined to save the nation.

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A row of people flashing victory signs with their hands.

By Genevieve Glatsky

The flashing neon lights. The cheering audience. The lively host with slicked back hair in a sea foam green suit. The panel of judges in dark sunglasses. The contestants who share emotional personal stories before belting their songs into a microphone.

It has all the elements of a typical singing competition. But this contest’s winner will not earn money or a recording contract.

Instead, contestants on the show, “M Factor,” write and perform songs in a competition to become the official campaign jingle for the party of President Nicolás Maduro, the authoritarian leader of Venezuela.

Mr. Maduro’s repressive government, which has been in power for over a decade, is under investigation by an international court for crimes against humanity.

But on the home front Mr. Maduro has tried, at times, to promote a softer side, using state-controlled media to portray his administration as goofy, fun-loving personalities working hard to save the nation from what they characterize as imperialist enemies, namely the United States.

In his own weekly television show Mr. Maduro appears next to brightly attired traditional singers and dancers who promote his policies in song. Another series on state television features a cartoon superhero named “ Super Mustache ” who bears a striking resemblance to Mr. Maduro rescuing the Venezuelan people from disaster.

Such shows are seen by many as a distraction from years of economic struggle that have led more than seven million Venezuelans, a fourth of the country’s population, to leave since 2015.

But the host of the “M Factor” Winston Vallenilla, a longtime television actor and supporter of Mr. Maduro, who is also a national legislator, said this was not true.

“‘M Factor’ was born from a movement of artists,’’ he said in an interview. “It was born from the need of the people to express themselves through music. It is not born out of a call from President Nicolás Maduro.”

“There is no economic interest here,’’ he added. “The only interest is the interest of the homeland.”

The producer of the “M Factor,’’ Camilla Fabri, said in a news release that the show was conceived after Mr. Maduro’s campaign received multiple jingle proposals “ spontaneously .”

The program, which was first broadcast on April 28 on the public television station TVES, will feature 35 contestants across eight episodes. The final episode will be broadcast on June 10, seven weeks before the scheduled July 28 presidential election.

“In Venezuela there are so many singers, so many promises,” Mr. Maduro said when he announced the contest three weeks ago. “We have to express this historic moment, express it with their yearnings, their hopes.”

The judges, all of whom are known Maduro supporters with business ties to the government, give little criticism of the performances and much praise for the president, whose approval rating otherwise hovers around 35 percent.

Denunciations of the United States, which has imposed severe economic sanctions on Venezuela, come up frequently — from the host, from Mr. Maduro’s campaign messages that air during the show, and from one contestant whose song included the phrase: “they want to dominate us, that gringo empire.”

“The United States has done us a lot of harm,” Mr. Vallenilla said during one episode. “Always trying to undermine the freedom and the independence, the sovereignty of the people.” Throughout the program Mr. Vallenilla refers to Mr. Maduro as the “president of peace” and “the greatest defender of culture in Venezuela.”

One contestant, wearing a cowboy hat and surrounded by flamenco dancers sang: “Listen to me, Nicolás. I’m going to shout it out loud: With 10 million votes you will have your triumph for sure.” Afterward, Mr. Vallenilla chatted onstage with the contestant, known as Neo Blanco.

“He is not here, but he is watching you on television,” Mr. Vallenilla said, referring to the president. “So what would you say to President Nicolás Maduro at this special moment?”

“Don’t give up, compadre . You have a lot of people out there,” Neo Blanco said. “If we have to hang up our hats someday and go to the toughest battle, count on us, brother.”

Sheyla Urdaneta contributed reporting from Maracaibo.

COMMENTS

Freedom of Contract and the New Right
Abstract. Freedom of Contract began as an economic and political ideal. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, the law started to reflect the new ideology. First there was a strong movement to repeal much obsolete legislation of a highly paternalistic character; then the tides turned, and the movement was the other way around.
Liberty of Contract and Lochner v. New York
Footnotes Jump to essay-1 See 183 U.S. (16 Wall.) 36, 83-111 (1873) (Field, J., dissenting); id. at 111-124 (Bradley, J., dissenting). Jump to essay-2 165 U.S. 578, 589 (1897); see also Coppage v. Kansas, 236 U.S. 1, 14 (1915) (stating that [i]ncluded in the right of personal liberty and the right of private property—partaking of the nature of each—is the right to make contracts for ...
PDF Freedom of Contract and Fundamental Fairness for Individual Parties
The norms of justice and fairness are seen as competitors to the formalistic use of contract rules to promote certainty in contractual transactions. The latter is individualistic in its perspective and incorporates notions of freedom, security, and efficiency. The former is communitarian centered in its focus.
Freedom of contract
Freedom of contract is the process in which individuals and groups form contracts without government restrictions.This is opposed to government regulations such as minimum-wage laws, competition laws, economic sanctions, restrictions on price fixing, or restrictions on contracting with undocumented workers.The freedom to contract is the underpinning of laissez-faire economics and is a ...
Essays on Contract
Atiyah's present collection of Essays on Contract, written over a career of several decades, but revised for this present publication, is perhaps best understood against the background of his best-known work, The Rise and Fall of Freedom of Contract,l which delivers a similar message from an historical perspective. In the idyllic era that ...
Contracts, Promises and the Law of Obligations
First, he rejects my view (expressed in The Rise and Fall of Freedom of Contract rather than in the above essay) that it is 'misconceived' to try to separate out the law of restitution from the law of contract. He suggests first that there is a logical distinction between restitutionary and contractual liability: restitution concerns the ...
Essays on Contract
Originally published in 1988 and now available in a revised paperback edition, this collection of essays by one of the leading contract theorists of the common law world concerns the theory and foundations of contractual liability. This paperback edition includes a new essay, "Freedom of Contract and the New Right," which charts the latest shift in the development of contract law back in the ...
Essays on contract
This revised edition has been updated and expanded to include a new essay on freedom of contract and the New Right, which charts the latest shift in the development of contract law. The author argues that this shift can be traced to the New Right's advocacy of political and economic freedom. Atiyah, P. S.
Contract, Freedom of
Freedom of contract is a fundamental principle of most modern contract laws, expressing three related ideas: parties should be free to choose their contracting partners ("party or partner freedom"), to agree freely on the terms of their agreement ("term freedom") and where agreements have been freely made, parties should be held to their bargains and contracts should be enforceable by ...
Freedom of Contract the Meaning and Significance
The freedom to enter into contracts and to direct the use of economic resources one owns are essential to the operation of a market economy. Nevertheless, American labor law, especially since the 1930s, has altered the terms and conditions under which unions collectively bargain to heavily favor unions over the firms that hire union labor.
The Essence of Freedom of Contract
For example, Australian contract law, as many other such laws, is rooted in the English common law, which is partially accompanied by statutory protection laws (Johnson & Millar, 2021). It is stated that: "the basic principle of Australian contract law is freedom of contract, under which parties are at liberty to strike whatever bargain they ...
[PDF] Freedom of Contract
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Freedom of Contract
In doing this, you are both exercising your own right to freedom of contract, in that you pick which tariff you use, and the sanctity doctrine, in that you expect that service to be maintained for a certain period in exchange for the money you provide the service provider in return. Law Books. Law Tutor provides the most comprehensive and ...
Freedom of Contract by David E Bernstein :: SSRN
Abstract. This essay provides a concise overview of the history of the constitutional status of freedom of contract in the United States, with particular attention to the rise and fall of the "liberty of contract" doctrine in the early 20th century.
Freedom of contract essay, types of contracts
The principle of freedom of contract was preserved by the Sale of Goods Act 1893 where it is expressly provided that any right, duty or liability arose under the contract of sale by implication of law could be negatived or varied by express agreement or by the course of dealing between the parties or by usage, if such usage can bind both the ...
Freedom of Contract
Freedom of Contract. Freedom of contract is defined as the: "Right of an adult to make a legally binding mutual agreement with one or more other persons, without governmental interference as to what type of obligations he or she can take upon himself or herself. " [1] English law has for a while now been known as believing in freedom of ...
English Contract Law Recognises Freedom Of Contract
English Contract Law Recognises Freedom Of Contract. "English contract law recognises freedom of contract and not fairness as the overriding principle in the formation and performance of a contract.". Critically discuss this statement with reference to relevant law and academic opinions. The law relating to freedom of contract is defined as ...
Consumer Rights in Electronic Contracts and Distance Selling
This essay aims to evaluate the consumer protection provisions of the ECD and DSD applicable to electronic contracts. ... The doctrine of freedom of contract has always been respected by the Law, which allows parties to provide for the terms and conditions that will govern the relationship. The Principles of European Contract Law, however ...
Duress and the Freedom of Contract
Duress and Freedom of Contract. 10 Jul. Written By Law Tutor. The Doctrine of duress unjustifiably violates the basic principle of freedom of contract. Introduction. This paper will discuss the proposition that the doctrine of duress and its justification. It will examine the doctrine and critically discuss if it violates and sit uncomfortably ...
Essay: Freedom to contract and implied contractual terms
The CRA limits 'freedom of contract' since the act mainly focuses on securing consumer rights and protection and this comes at a cost. Businesses involved in 'business to consumer' contracts are no longer free to contract on their own terms thus. If the L'Estrange v E Graucob [1934] case was decided after acts such as the Unfair ...
Freedom Of Contract
Quick Reference. A person's freedom to enter a binding agreement on terms of his or her choice, without regulation by the state. Freedom to contract is often limited by the state through ... From: freedom of contract in Australian Law Dictionary ». Subjects: Law.
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Academic freedom is related to, but not the same as, freedom of speech in the First Amendment sense. In the public square, you can say or publish ignorant things, hateful things, in many cases ...
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Guest Essay. Europe Is About to Drown in the River of the Radical Right. May 7, 2024. ... he wrote, history is our only remaining guide. The secret to Roman freedom, he explained in the ...
The state of global press freedom in 10 numbers
This past Friday, May 3, was World Press Freedom Day. The date marks the anniversary of the Windhoek Declaration, a 1991 statement, named for the capital of Namibia, that asserted the need for "an independent and pluralistic African press."As the UN puts it, the annual event is "a reminder to governments of the need to respect their commitment to press freedom," but also "a day of ...
Meat, Freedom and Ron DeSantis
First, it puts the lie to any claim that the right is the side standing firm for limited government; government doesn't get much more intrusive than having politicians tell you what you can and ...
Venezuelan Show Contestants Compete for Maduro's Presidential Campaign
The program is one way President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela is trying portray himself and his allies as joyful, colorful characters determined to save the nation.