Free Speech Teaching Guide 3: The Problem of National Security Secrets

November 5, 2025

This guide explores the relationship between secrecy and the First Amendment by exploring two interrelated legal problems: the rights of leakers and the press to publish secret information; and the bureaucratic process by which information is classified as secret in the first place. These issues are at the heart of recent conflicts about whistleblowers and classified information – individuals like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden have faced jail time for sharing secrets with the public.

Free Speech Teaching Guide 2: Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969): Defining and Arguing Hate Speech

October 20, 2025

This teaching guide includes a structured guide to explaining the case to students, a classroom exercise on the value of tolerating hateful speech, and a classroom exercise to think about the harms of hateful speech.

Free Speech Teaching Guide 1: The Birth of the Modern First Amendment and How Oliver Wendell Holmes Changed His Mind

October 6, 2025

This guide focuses on the history of free speech in one crucial year (1919), exploring how one influential Supreme Court justice changed his mind about the value of antiwar speech and in the process wrote opinions that have shaped our attitudes to free speech ever since. It provides students an opportunity to see the First Amendment evolve at a crucial hinge in its history, and it also provides them an opportunity to think about how far the rights to free speech should extend during wartime.