Freedom through Dissent
September 22, 2025
When you visit the Wassmuth Center for Human Rights, one of the first works of art you will encounter is Katherine Shaughnessy’s Ginsburg’s Gauntlet. The piece emulates the design of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s lace dissent collar, which she wore when authoring dissenting opinions – statements that challenged the majority and preserved an alternative view of the law for the future.
This tradition points to something rare and essential: the Supreme Court has a built-in mechanism for dissent. Even at the nation’s highest legal body, where decisions shape generations, space is deliberately created for disagreement. Those dissenting words do more than record opposition; they keep ideas alive, invite debate, and sometimes, years later, become the foundation for new law. Justice John Marshall Harlan’s lone dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), where the Court upheld racial segregation, declared that “our Constitution is color-blind.” Nearly six decades later, that dissent helped lay the groundwork for Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which struck down segregation in public schools.
At a time when division can tempt us to retreat into the comfort of sameness, this model is instructive. Democracy–and the respect for human dignity it requires–demands something higher: holding space for dissent, listening to voices that challenge us, and remembering the humanity of those with whom we disagree.
History offers sharp warnings of what happens when that space is denied. During the McCarthy era of the 1950s, Americans were summoned before congressional committees and accused of being communist sympathizers. Teachers were fired, journalists blacklisted, and artists silenced. Their careers were destroyed not for crimes, but for ideas. Fear shrank America’s imagination and eroded trust. We forgot that democracy’s strength lies not in uniformity, but in its ability to tolerate, and even welcome, difference.
We see the same danger in Nazi Germany’s book burnings, when officials cast thousands of volumes into the flames – works by Jewish writers, political dissidents, and anyone whose words challenged the regime. Attempts to control what could be read, spoken, or imagined did not bring stability. They deepened fear and destroyed freedom.
But there are also inspiring examples of courage in the face of silence. In 1848, women gathered in Seneca Falls, New York, to demand rights long denied. Their declaration that “all men and women are created equal” was ridiculed at the time. But persistence carried their voices forward, reshaping democracy itself. A century later, young people staged sit-ins at segregated lunch counters across the South. By simply taking a seat, they risked insults, beatings, and arrest. Yet their nonviolent dissent laid bare the injustice of segregation and helped bend the conscience of a nation.
These stories remind us that freedom of speech is not about only protecting the voices we prefer. It is about ensuring that all voices – unpopular, uncomfortable, or challenging – can enter the public square so that truth and justice can rise on their own strength. Ideas must be allowed to meet one another in the open, where the best ones prove themselves by resonating with possibility. When voices are silenced, coercion replaces democracy.
In this moment of deep division, we must remember our shared humanity. Beneath our disagreements, most of us want the same things: to live in peace, to raise our families with dignity, to experience joy, and to pursue our dreams without fear. Human rights affirm these universal yearnings, and protecting dissent is one way to make them a lived reality for all.
Like Justice Ginsburg’s dissent collar made disagreement visible and powerful, we too can choose to embrace difference rather than fear it. To hold space for dissent is not weakness. It is strength. It is the work of democracy. It is how we honor human dignity. And it is how we remember that truth does not need force to prevail; it needs freedom.