Comment by jessriedel
9 years ago
No. The 1st amendment is specific to the government, but free speech is a much broader normative concept. It is about cordoning off the market place of ideas from reprisals in meatspace. A canonical defense is John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty" (available free online).
It might be a canonical concept, but it's not encoded in law.
Indeed. The law does not completely protect free speech; the first amendment prevents the federal government from infringing it, but it's up to us to defend it when it's threatened by other private citizens or organizations.