Opening Dialogue - Lee C. Bollinger & Geoffrey R. Stone

abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”1 Of course, in the United States, “free speech” is not only part of the constitu- tional Bill of Rights; it is also a cultural and social norm by which we choose to live. [...] Several of the essays in this volume therefore take note of how the meaning and health of “free speech” depend both on judicial interpretations of the First Amendment and on how all citizens and institutions interpret and abide by the general principle. [...] Then, in the 1950s, with the rise of McCarthyism, the nation slipped back into a period of severe intolerance and, once again, the Supreme Court assented.6 But the arrival of the civil rights era, along with national upheavals around the Vietnam War and other highly divisive issues, led the Court, which once again learned from its earli- er mistakes, to embrace the rigorous and now bedrock interpr. [...] But how should these values of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of inquiry play out in the current world and in the world of the future? How should we deal with constantly changing technology such as social media and artificial intelligence? Of course, at least in the abstract, this is not a “new” challenge. [...] But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas–that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their.