Who Gets First Amendment Protections These Days, Anyway?

On a recent episode of Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick talked with Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, to unpack how the scope of the First Amendment continues to grow even as it fails in the face of so many of the free speech issues we face today. A portion of their conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, has been transcribed below. Dahlia Lithwick: I think I've had a Post-it note pinned to my screen saying, "Do a First Amendment show" for three years. It sweeps in every news cycle. From the Facebook "Supreme Court," your own litigation around Trump's tweets, cancel culture, the speech defenses that came up at the impeachment trial--I think of the First Amendment as a framework that governs all of those things. As you suggested to me, when we were thinking about this show, the First Amendment is "everywhere but nowhere."