Techdirt Podcast Episode 292: The Problem Of 'Jawboning'
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‘Jawboning’ Definition: Threat or Rational Talk
The word “jawboning,” as used by most Government officials and businessmen these days, refers to public exhortations and/or implied threats by the Administra tion as a means of convinc ing business or labor to adopt certain attitudes and policies.
This definition, however, seems to be a far cry from the original use of the slang expression. In the Dictionary of American Slang, edited by Harold Wentworth and Stuart Berg Flexner, the first definition given for the in transitive verb “jawbone” is: “To carry on sincere, rational talk that leads to establish ing financial credit or trust.”
Perhaps the modern usage of the term is derived from the slang word “jaw.” Went worth and Flexner define the verb as “to talk” and “to lecture a person; to give a long reprimand.”
---- May 27, 1970 This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them
Description
"Jawboning", or "moral suasion," in economics and politics is an unofficial technique of public and private discussions and arm-twisting, which may work by the implicit threat of future government regulation. Wikipediafrom the the-formalities-of-informal-coercion dept
"Most people are pretty clear on the fact that the First Amendment prevents the government from making rules about speech — but what about when government officials make informal demands or threaten retaliation related to speech? Such actions have been ruled to violate the First Amendment, but this practice — dubbed "jawboning" by this week's guest — raises messy legal edge-cases and grey areas. We're joined by University of Chicago Law Professor Genevieve Lakier, who recently authored an article for Lawfare on the subject, to discuss the legal history and status of jawboning and the problem of informal government coercion.
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Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
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Filed Under: first amendment, free speech, jawboning, podcast
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