The liberty of expression has been fixed in the firmament of our social values since our nation's beginning--the United States was the first government to legalize free speech and a free press as fundamental rights. But when the British began colonizing the New World, any words, true or false, thought to disparage the government were judged as criminally subversive.

So when in 1733 a small newspaper, the New-York Weekly Journal, printed scathing articles assailing the new British governor, William Cosby, as corrupt and abusive, colonial New York was scandalized. The paper's...

The liberty of written and spoken expression has been fixed in the firmament of our social values since our nation's beginning--the government of the United States was the first to legalize free speech and a free press as fundamental rights. But when the British began colonizing the New World, strict censorship was the iron rule of the realm; any words, true or false, that were thought to disparage the government were judged a criminally subversive--and duly punishable--threat to law and order. Even after Parliament lifted press censorship late in the seventeenth century, printers...