This is a terrific little article. The First Amendment states that "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech or of the press" among other things. Note that it doesn't say that Congress shall make no law abridging speech of the press absolutely. So any abridgement has to comply with some understanding of what "the freedom of" means.
From the article:
. . . nearly everyone, as best I can tell, saw “freedom of speech” and “freedom of the press” as providing less than complete constitutional protection for spoken or printed words. And this suggests that the term “freedom of” referred to some understanding that there is a proper scope of such freedom (even if the scope was unsettled in some particulars), rather to unlimited freedom to say or print anything one pleases. It’s much like, if tomorrow a state enacted a law protecting “the freedom to marry,” we probably wouldn’t think that it means the freedom to marry a 10-year-old, or the freedom to marry one’s daughter, or (depending on the circumstances) even the freedom to marry several people at once. “The freedom to marry” would be seen as referring to a broad but not unlimited concept that is less than the freedom to marry anyone one pleases.
This adds to our discussion of the balance of civil liberties versus the greater interest of society in 2301 - and to a degree to our discussion of how the judiciary acts in 2302 - in addition to the general question of what the Constitution in fact means and how we come to a determination of that meaning.
