Being in Public: The Threat and Promise of Stranger Contact

License to Harass provides a sociolegal study of racially and sexually abusive within common outdoor spaces. Based on interviews with street users across three Californian cities, Laura Beth Nielsen's book examines subjects' experiences with offensive public speech, their attitudes about the extent to which it poses a problem for American society, and their beliefs about whether the law should be employed to restrict it (Nielsen 2004, 2). At the heart of Nielsen's account is an interrogation of how members of the public see law's role-should law be used to regulate or ban socially insulting speech, and, if not, why not? What place, in particular, do free speech principles occupy in the case against state regulation?