This chapter provides a preliminary sketch of the Supreme Court of the current era. It describes the distinctive political environment in which the sitting justices were appointed and in which they function. It highlights the role that a conservative legal organization, the Federalist Society, has played in vetting potential nominees and in ensuring that the sitting justices who were appointed by Republican presidents are reliably conservative in their commitments. The chapter also discusses the rise of originalism as a theory of constitutional interpretation and frames issues about the relationship between originalist methodology and substantively conservative values that will be a focus of attention through the remainder of the book. Finally, it gives introductory, capsule biographies of each of the current justices. As later chapters will elaborate, it is impossible to understand the Court’s dynamics without a grasp of how the individual justices, taken one by one, approach their jobs.

Today three forces threaten to limit speech. The first pits guns against words, creating a showdown between the Second Amendment and the First. The second sees powerful speakers invoking their right to speak in order to silence other people’s speech. Third, and perhaps the most subtle, the monitoring of our digital speech by government and business chills our ability to say what we want online. Free speech will survive provided we remain vigilant in defending the speech rights of the minority against what has been called the tyranny of the majority.