The Supreme Court wrapped its latest term with a string of rulings that reinforced First Amendment protections, and the liberal wing of the bench did not take it quietly. Across cases touching social media regulation, government speech coercion, and compelled disclosure, the conservative majority held firm on free expression principles while Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson issued sharp dissents warning the court had gone too far.
The pattern was unmistakable. In case after case, the six conservative justices treated the First Amendment as a hard boundary against government overreach, while the three liberal justices argued that the majority's reading was too rigid, too absolutist, and too disconnected from real-world consequences. The result was a term that free speech advocates celebrated and progressives called dangerous.
The term's First Amendment docket was unusually loaded. The justices took up challenges to state laws regulating social media platforms, a case involving the federal government's contacts with tech companies over content moderation, and disputes over compelled speech and association rights. In each instance, the conservative majority sided with broader speech protections.
In Moody v. NetChoice, the court addressed Florida and Texas laws that sought to prevent social media companies from censoring conservative viewpoints. The conservative majority, while not fully resolving the cases on the merits, sent them back to lower courts with instructions that made clear editorial discretion by platforms carries First Amendment weight. The liberal justices pushed for a reading that would have given state legislatures more room to regulate how platforms curate content.
The Murthy v. Missouri case, formerly known as Missouri v. Biden, examined whether the Biden administration crossed constitutional lines when federal officials pressured social media companies to suppress posts about COVID-19 origins, vaccine skepticism, and election integrity. The majority dismissed the case on standing grounds, a result that frustrated many conservatives. But even in that procedural outcome, the court's language about the dangers of government coercion carried doctrinal weight that future litigants will cite.
As the Washington Examiner detailed in its analysis of the term, the liberal justices did not merely disagree with outcomes. They challenged the foundational premises the conservative majority used to interpret the First Amendment, arguing that speech protections must be balanced against the government's interest in combating misinformation and protecting public safety.
Justice Sotomayor, in multiple dissents throughout the term, accused the majority of weaponizing the First Amendment. She argued the court's conservative wing had transformed free speech doctrine from a shield for the powerless into a sword wielded by corporations and political actors to block regulation.
Justice Jackson went further in oral arguments and written opinions, questioning whether the First Amendment framework the majority applied was suited to the digital age at all. Jackson suggested that the internet's scale and speed created speech-related harms the Founders never anticipated, and that courts should allow legislatures more flexibility to address them.
The friction was not subtle. In one exchange during oral arguments, Jackson openly wondered whether strict First Amendment scrutiny would prevent the government from addressing "the most dangerous" speech online. Conservative justices pushed back hard, with Justice Samuel Alito noting that the government's track record of identifying "dangerous" speech has historically included suppressing political dissent and inconvenient truths.
This dynamic echoed across the full term. The broader pattern of conservative majority victories extended well beyond the First Amendment, but the speech cases crystallized the ideological divide most sharply.
The term confirmed what court watchers have observed since Justice Amy Coney Barrett's confirmation cemented the conservative supermajority: the 6-3 split is not a fluke. It is a structural feature of the Roberts Court in its current composition. On the most contested legal questions, the six Republican-appointed justices consistently outvoted the three Democratic appointees.
That margin held on issues far beyond speech. The court issued 6-3 rulings on executive power, immigration enforcement, and campaign finance during the same term. In three separate decisions, the conservative majority bolstered the Trump administration's border and deportation authority, reinforcing the pattern of outcomes that left progressive legal organizations scrambling for responses.
The First Amendment rulings fit this mold but carried a distinct sting for the left. For decades, progressives viewed free speech jurisprudence as friendly territory. The ACLU built its brand defending unpopular speakers. Liberal academics championed the marketplace of ideas. That era is over. Today's First Amendment battles pit conservative speech claims against progressive regulatory ambitions, and the conservative justices are winning them decisively.
The same 6-3 alignment appeared when the court struck down a 50-year-old coordinated spending cap in campaign finance law, a decision that further enraged progressive groups who view the court's speech rulings as enabling moneyed interests.
The tone of the liberal dissents this term was notably more combative than in prior years. Legal scholars observed that Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson appeared to be writing not just for the legal record but for a political audience, framing the majority's rulings as threats to democracy and public welfare.
Kagan, often the most measured of the three liberal justices, joined dissents that accused the majority of ignoring practical consequences in favor of doctrinal purity. Her willingness to sign onto sharply worded opinions signaled that the liberal bloc sees the current trajectory as worth fighting publicly, even when the votes are not there.
Jackson's dissents drew particular attention. As the court's newest justice and its first Black woman, Jackson has not been shy about staking out positions that challenge the majority's originalist framework. On the First Amendment, she repeatedly argued that historical analysis alone cannot answer questions about speech in a world of algorithms, viral misinformation, and platform monopolies.
Conservative legal commentators responded that Jackson's approach would hand the government a roving license to regulate speech based on content, precisely the outcome the First Amendment was designed to prevent. The Federalist Society and allied organizations pointed to the term's rulings as vindication of the originalist project that began with Justice Antonin Scalia and now commands a supermajority.
The Murthy case, despite its procedural resolution, left a doctrinal door open that both sides expect to walk through in future terms. The question of when government "encouragement" of private censorship becomes unconstitutional coercion remains unresolved on the merits. Lower courts are already developing conflicting frameworks, which virtually guarantees the Supreme Court will revisit the issue.
For conservatives, the stakes are personal. The government's pressure campaigns against social media companies during 2020 and 2021 targeted speech about lab-leak theories, vaccine side effects, and election procedures that later proved to be within the bounds of legitimate debate. The failure to reach the merits in Murthy means no binding precedent yet prevents a future administration from running the same playbook.
The liberal justices' dissents in the speech cases suggest they would uphold significant government involvement in content moderation, provided it falls short of outright censorship orders. That position aligns with the Biden administration's defense of its social media contacts as "informational" rather than coercive. But critics note the distinction between "informing" and "pressuring" collapses when the entity doing the informing wields regulatory power over the platforms it contacts.
The same conservative majority that struck down a Hawaii gun law over Jackson's blistering dissent has shown no appetite for softening its approach to enumerated rights, whether the Second Amendment or the First. The liberal justices' frustration is mounting precisely because they see no path to reversing the trend without a change in the court's composition.
The progressive movement's discomfort with robust First Amendment protections marks one of the sharpest ideological reversals in modern legal history. As recently as the Obama era, Democrats championed free speech as a core progressive value. The shift began when speech protections started cutting against progressive policy goals: campaign finance regulation after Citizens United, compelled speech in 303 Creative, and now government censorship-by-proxy in the social media context.
Liberal legal scholars have begun openly arguing that the First Amendment needs to be "rebalanced" to account for power dynamics, a position that would have been unthinkable in mainstream legal academia 20 years ago. The conservative majority has shown no interest in that project. If anything, this term's rulings suggest the six conservative justices view the First Amendment's protections as most important precisely when the government claims an urgent reason to override them.
The term's outcomes also reflect a broader pattern of the conservative majority issuing decisions that cut across the political interests of the Democratic Party. The court's willingness to overrule lower courts by the same 6-3 margin in criminal cases underscores that the supermajority is not hesitant about exercising its authority, regardless of which circuit or which political constituency finds itself on the losing end.
What makes this term's First Amendment rulings matter beyond the courtroom is their timing. Governments at every level, federal, state, and local, are pursuing new tools to regulate online speech. The European Union's Digital Services Act has created a model that American progressives openly admire. Several Democratic members of Congress have introduced bills that would impose content moderation obligations on platforms, effectively conscripting private companies into a government speech-policing regime.
The conservative majority's rulings this term did not foreclose all regulation. But they established that any law targeting speech, or pressuring private parties to suppress speech, will face serious constitutional scrutiny. That baseline matters enormously as the regulatory battles move forward.
The liberal justices' dissents read as previews of the arguments that will be deployed in those fights. Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson are building a counter-doctrine that treats the First Amendment as one interest among many, to be weighed against equality, safety, and democratic stability. The conservative majority treats it as a structural command that binds the government regardless of how noble its stated purpose might be.
That is not a disagreement that will be resolved by compromise. It is a fundamental clash over what the Constitution demands, and for now, the side that reads the First Amendment as meaning what it says holds six votes.
