Free Speech

Few areas of contemporary jurisprudence are evolving as rapidly, or with as much consequence, as the constitutional law of online expression. The Review's commentary in this subject area attends to the doctrinal threads that connect classical First Amendment theory — the protections accorded to anonymous speech, the limits of state action, the longstanding distinction between speakers and conduits — to the novel pressures imposed by large-scale platform moderation, algorithmic curation, and an information environment in which speech is at once globally distributed and locally consequential. We attempt, where possible, to ground discussion in the case law rather than the headlines, and to take seriously the institutional difficulty of crafting rules that protect expression without immunizing harm.