Thomas Healy

And the other justices on the Supreme Court, they went to his house and they tried to talk him out of it.

And he said, no, it's my duty.

And over the next decade or so, when other free speech cases come up.

Holmes continues to write very eloquent, passionate defenses of free speech.

And gradually, the other members of the court start to listen.

In the marketplace of ideas.

It turns out the people I was looking for all my life is what you people would call nerds.

It's kind of weird, you know, commercial understanding of free speech.

What about thinking about us all as scientists?

Absolutely right.

We're not buying and selling potatoes.

We're testing the theory of relativity.

It turns out that Holmes relied on another metaphor in his Abrams dissent as well.

He writes, that at any rate is the theory of our constitution.

It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment.

It doesn't end.

We don't win the game, right?

The whole point of free speech is not that, oh, we've got free speech, now democracy is easy.

No, democracy is hard.

And one of the ways to promote the success of an experiment is to build in some flexibility.