What Will Our Platonic Guardians Think up Next?

Law students spend the better part of three years beetling their brows over the study of constitutional law—a mercurial, opaque, highly theoretical system of textual exegesis, which nobody but the tenured and long-winded professor pretends to understand. And the capsheaf of con-law contwistification is First Amendment law. The First Amendment protects “the freedom of speech” and has spawned an absorbing delusional system of case law, because the harder you work to understand it, the more complex and inscrutable it becomes, until its tracts and tiers and modes of analyses, its time, place, and manner restrictions, its public and private figures and forums, its symbolic expressions and invasions of privacy–all evanesce into vaporous metaphysics.