Things like harassment, or intentional infliction of emotional distress can be a basis for pain and suffering lawsuits.

https://www.forbes.com/advisor/legal/personal-injury/suing-e...

Things like insults, shaming, and verbal abuse are part of emotional abuse in divorce cases. These need not be evidence of actions or character. These can be used for an at fault divorce. What is consided to br an insult or shaming can vary greatly on perspective. Not to mention, the court may not stick ro just these examples and could include other things that makes the other person feel bad - "I hate this meal. Why do you always make this?"

https://www.jerkinsfamilylaw.com/emotional-abuse-and-divorce...

Again, those are legal principles that have been enshrined in law for a long time. The article does not address them, which leads me to believe the author was thinking of more general cases of offensive speech, like the campus speaker example he offers, and not specific cases of verbal abuse. There may be cases where people are urging broader scope for those laws, which have a pretty high bar as the lawyer commented earlier in the thread. But most of the debate around offensive speech focuses on the issue of access to platforms.

When it comes to public universities, there is a legitimate question, since a publicly funded university may be considered a state actor. But when it comes to private services like social media where it seem most of the controversy lies, they're free to set any rules they want. And unsurprisingly, their terms of service generally give them broad discretion on who they let use their service.

"When speech causes emotional or mental pain, the offended parties are morally entitled to nothing in the form of compensation from or punishment for the offender."

Considering this is repeated a couple times by the author, it seems they are talking about a general statement and not a narrow circumstance, even if they're using a specific example. It's important to point out that the statement above is not universally true, or if it is, then our laws are immoral.

"Again, those are legal principles that have been enshrined in law for a long time."

“When we do become offended, as we all will, we must settle for responding with criticism or contempt, and stop short of demanding that the offender be punished or required to make restitution,”

It seems to me that restitution and punishment would include those leveled by the legal system. Simply because something has be law for a long time does not make it off limits to discussion, especially if it's application/interpretation has changed over that time.

These are fair points if we read the article as a criticism of existing law. I didn't read it that way, mostly because of the current political context where "cancel culture" is a big issue. But I can certainly see how it can be taken that way. In that case, I can only say that I would strongly disagree that speech alone should never be actionable, there are just too many obvious exceptions such as the ones we've talked about here (libel, intentional infliction of emotional distress, harassment). Laws evolve for a reason. They are not academic exercises in philosophy, they arise from experience.