Free speech under threat”: isn’t that, in Western democracies anyway, an anachronism, an antique item from the fusty cabinet of disused historical curiosities?1 I mean, haven’t we waged, and won, the battle for free speech? After all, this is the twenty-first century. Areopagitica; A speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing, to the Parlament of England, was published in 1644. It stands as a landmark in the coalescence of free speech (unless you happened to be Catholic). Other landmarks followed in short order. As the historian Jeremy Black notes in his essay below, the 1662 Licensing of the Press Act fell into disuse when Parliament declined to renew it in 1695. Britain then began to nurture a fourth estate conspicuously free from official government censorship (the preferred word today is “regulation,” which to some ears sounds softer than “censorship”). In 1765, the power of the secretary of state to haul an author or proprietor of a newspaper before the Star Chamber was declared illegal. Since that time—until recently, anyway—the British press had been gloriously, and sometimes ingloriously, rambunctious, delighting in scandal, airing the dirty laundry of ministers and other worthies with cheery abandon, checked chiefly by Britain’s strict libel laws.

In the United States, the First Amendment was added to the U.S. Constitution at the end of the eighteenth century. And then there have been all those later battles—over Ulysses, for example, as well as over other, less edifying