PROFESSOR MARTIN SKLADANY CO-AUTHORS OP-ED ON “PROTESTING ETHICALLY”
September 2024 — Martin Skladany, Samuel Weiss Faculty Scholar and Professor of Law at Penn State Dickinson Law, recently co-authored an op-ed in Project Syndicate that explores the ethics of protests. Professor Skladany’s co-author was Peter Singer, Emeritus Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and founder of the nonprofit organization, The Life You Can Save.
“Protesting Ethically” explores the ethics of protests, and Skladany and Singer argue for a new “protest proportionality principle” with four factors that protestors should consider to guide their activism. The op-ed summarizes that “when we are assessing protests in democratic societies, nonviolence is not the only criterion that must be weighed. The principle of proportionality can serve as a useful guide to the factors that protesters should consider, enabling us to defend the right to protest while also specifying protesters’ ethical responsibilities.”
Professor Martin Skladany is a professor of intellectual property, law and international development, and law and technology. He is the author of Copyright's Arc (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and Big Copyright Versus the People: How Major Content Providers are Destroying Creativity and How to Stop Them (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Previously, as a copyright and litigation associate at Debevoise & Plimpton LLP, he was a member of the legal team that represented the Association of American Publishers in the Google Books copyright suit.