This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, November 9th,

2023. I'm Caleb Brown. Freedom of speech is under constant threat in the

United States, so we should understand as clearly as we can what the right of free speech

delivers to us and what extending that right to everyone demands of us.

Nadine Stross and is author of the new book Free Speech, What Everyone Needs to Know.

We spoke earlier this week.

One of the things that you note in your book is sort of helping readers reconcile the areas where the Supreme Court has been perhaps at cross-purposes in its opinions regarding freedom of speech.

If you just listen to the internet or casual court watchers, you would get the impression

that this Supreme Court has been fairly consistent over the last few decades when it comes to freedom of speech.

So where are those tensions?

The Supreme Court since the mid-20th century has become increasingly speech protective, extending the

protection of the First Amendment to more and more topics and perspectives that historically have

been subject to restrictions.

So for example, until the mid-20th century, the Supreme Court even allowed hate speech,

speech that conveyed discriminatory attitudes, stereotypical views on bases such as race and ethnicity, the Supreme Court

upheld such a law, that changed in the second half of the 20th century. To take another example, the Supreme

Court for many years held that so-called commercial speech, speech that had an economic purpose including providing

information about price and other details as part of a commercial transaction.

The Supreme Court until shockingly recently held that that is absolutely excluded altogether

from First Amendment protection, but again,

beginning in the second half of the 20th century,

the Supreme Court has pretty much equated commercial speech

...