Great piece, Joe. I’m not an academic but suffice to say a lot of these questions spill over into the real world and Twittersphere. A friend told me, who attends a very prestigious law school, that many people in his public defender program would absolutely refuse to defend morally problematic people like police, which, well, frightened me because of our deeply ingrained precedent that everyone deserves legal counsel and a fair trial. My students, some of whom had bad run ins with the law, care a lot about everyone being entitled to a fair defense.

Where a society becomes more critical and dismissive of fair speech, I believe it’s up to our courts to defend it.