12 Contemporary Free Speech Issues

In this chapter, we look at some important Supreme Court decisions on free speech in the past decade. The chapter sorts these cases into three categories. The first category involves issue areas where the government, for different reasons, argues for a creation of a new unprotected category of speech in order to justify an existing law. As we will see, the Court rejects such attempts.

The second deals with the expansion of the content-discrimination principle into areas of speech where it previously had not been applied, continuing the trend seen in Reed v. Town of Gilbert.

The third category involves the courts’ decisions regarding the development of social media. So far, federal courts have applied robust speech protections to these mediums, a decision which has obvious benefits but also, as we shall discuss in concluding this chapter, some potential costs.