Published December 21, 2024 at 2:19 p.m.
Inrikes. Lawyer, freedom of expression critic and porn activist Leif Silbersky has died at the age of 86.
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During his lifetime, Leif Silbersky became one of Sweden's most media-famous lawyers.
After graduating from law school at Stockholm University in the 1960s, he focused in particular on various media-highlighted and controversial cases, and often appeared in the press himself with committed comments on various legal cases.
Silbersky – the freedom of expression fighter
Silbersky also had a burning interest in freedom of expression and represented a seemingly contradictory line, where he combined a defense of certain kinds of freedom of expression – especially pornography – with a passionate opposition to, for example, the freedom of expression of nationalists and right-wing extremists.
In the book “Såra tukt och sedlighet: en debattbok om pornorofin”, Leif Silbersky highlighted himself as one of the most influential forces behind the sexual revolution in Sweden in the 1960s. According to the book, it was he who got the Stockholm District Court to release pornography in 1967, which a few years later led to the ban also disappearing from the penal code.
“In the same way that it is every citizen's right to freely get drunk, if he only has money for alcohol, it must be his and her right to freely excite themselves with pornography if he has money to buy it. That is what freedom is about. Therefore, set pornography free!” Silbersky thundered in the book.
In 2008, Silbersky's efforts for porn were questioned in an editorial in SvD, where Per Gudmundson criticized his work under the headline “Was pornography as good as Leif Silbersky wanted?”.
Silbersky – the opponent of freedom of expression
The scolding took on a different tone when the police granted the Nordic Resistance Movement (NMR) the right to demonstrate in Gothenburg in 2017. Even though the Swedish Constitution's rules on freedom of expression left the police with no alternative, Silbersky believed that the demonstration should have been stopped to prevent the wrong ideology from being expressed. “We send pictures all over the world and people are sitting in Germany and America reading about this. We should be ashamed that we allow a violent ideology to be expressed in the way that we are now allowed to do in Gothenburg. I think it is a shame,” Silbersky told Expressen at the time. “At the same time, he acknowledged that the Constitution's freedom of expression provision is clear, but believed that the police should break the law and refer to “common sense.” “Swedish law can never be at odds with common sense,” Silbersky told Expressen. “During his 86-year life, Silbersky also wrote around 30 detective stories. The hero of the books was a Jewish lawyer named Samuel Rosenbaum.