Modules

Why protect speech at all — truth, self-governance, autonomy, tolerance, checking — and the prior question every doctrine presupposes: what counts as speech? O'Brien governs the conduct half, Spence asks when conduct is speech, and Johnson shows the two colliding over a burning flag.

The most load-bearing line in the field. Content-based regulation draws strict scrutiny; content-neutral time, place and manner rules draw intermediate. Almost every case you meet after today is an argument about which side of that line a statute falls on.

What counts as an infringement in the first place. Prior restraints and the presumption against them, unconstitutional conditions, compelled speech, and the government's own voice — where the First Amendment simply does not apply.

The categories the Court has been willing to leave outside full protection, and how narrow each one turned out to be: Brandenburg's imminence requirement, Chaplinsky's shrinking fighting-words rule, and the mental state a true threat requires.

Reputation against speech. New York Times v. Sullivan constitutionalises defamation and the actual-malice standard reorganises the whole tort; Hustler extends the logic to emotional distress.

Speech that proposes a transaction — once unprotected, now governed by Central Hudson's four steps, with the boundaries of professional speech still contested.

Obscenity, indecency and child pornography: three doctrines that look alike and run on different justifications. Miller defines the category; Ferber leaves it behind entirely.

Money, elections and the First Amendment. Buckley's expenditure–contribution distinction, its critics, and what Citizens United did and did not decide.

Where you may speak. The public forum categories, their boundaries, and what happens when the government opens property for expression and then wants it back.

Free exercise at maximum voltage, and its retreat. Sherbert's compelling-interest test, Yoder's high-water mark, and Smith's rule that a neutral, generally applicable law needs no religious exemption.

What survived Smith: the ministerial exception, the individualised-exemption escape hatch, and the modern cases that have narrowed neutrality and general applicability almost to vanishing.

Establishment: the Lemon test, its long decline, and the endorsement and coercion frameworks that competed to replace it.

The modern battlegrounds — aid, religious symbols, and the history-and-tradition turn that displaced Lemon outright.

The four-question framework for fundamental rights: is there one, is it infringed, is the infringement justified, and are the means sufficiently related. Where unenumerated rights are located in the text — and incorporation, the step that made any of this apply to the states.

Family and reproduction: the right to direct a child's upbringing, the contraception line, and abortion before and after Dobbs — including what Dobbs left standing in the rest of the doctrine.

The right to refuse treatment and the right to die; and the arc from Bowers through Lawrence to Obergefell.

Rights the Court reaches by a different route — arms after Heller and Bruen, travel, and education as the right that was refused.

When a State can be sued, and by whom. The Eleventh Amendment, the Ex parte Young fiction, and abrogation.

Congress's power to enforce the Civil War Amendments — remedial against substantive, and the congruence-and-proportionality test that has policed the line since Boerne.