Memory laws affect us in various and often controversial ways. They sometimes impose criminal penalties on speech or conduct deemed offensive to the plight of national heroes or tragic victims. In that punitive form, memory laws impose limits on democratic freedoms of expression, association, the media, or on scholarly research.
Yet memory laws reach beyond the bounds of criminal law. Children everywhere grow up reading state-approved texts designed to impart not merely a knowledge, but an interpretation of history. Governments everywhere designate national memorial ceremonies or authorise the construction of public monuments. The line between punitive and non-punitive laws indeed remains far from clear. Decisions, for example, about the content of school texts ordinarily fall outside the criminal law, but, in many countries, instructors dissenting from a prescribed view of the past may find themselves dismissed or disciplined.
