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Free Speech

The Importance of Free Speech in American Public Junior High and High Schools

Ronald Den Otter | 5.26.2026 1:08 PM

When I was in college, liberals, not conservatives, were more zealous in defending free speech, when it came to issues like whether pornography ought to be constitutionally protected. In 1990, when I was in law school, and my first-year constitutional law class discussed Texas v. Johnson, the famous flag burning case, only the more conservative students thought that what Gregory Johnson did should not be constitutionally protected expressive conduct. At that time, a decade before I took Professor Volokh's free speech class when I was a graduate student in the political science department at UCLA, I hoped that someday, free speech would be a principle that would transcend partisanship. After all, it can be hard to predict what political party will control your school board, city council, state legislature, or Congress. If you give lawmakers the authority to censor an idea that you despise at one moment, whether you realize it, you also are giving them the authority to censor ideas that you find valuable in the future. No doubt, it can be very hard to stomach ideas that you find repulsive but inevitability, others will feel the same way about your ideas. In a society committed to free speech, the government must be neutral; it may not discriminate against viewpoints, including deeply offensive and even racist, sexist, and homophobic ones. No real human government will be able to censor "bad" viewpoints competently or fairly, even if we agreed which ones were bad most of the time. Equally importantly, the people who live in that society must be willing to allow others to speak their minds. The quality of their arguments ought to be beside the point.

These days in this country, it seems like a bad situation is becoming worse. On both the left and the right, of the American political spectrum, the natural tendency to censor disagreeable ideas seems increasingly more difficult to resist, including young adults. As someone who teaches at an undergraduate institution and has been doing so for more than twenty years, my impression is that college students are not nearly willing to countenance the expression of ideas, which they despise, as they........

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