David Schaefer, a friend of many years and a classmate from the University of Chicago, has, for me, an enduring license to sail into me for anything I have written. For we had acquired, at Chicago, the temper of offering our critiques of one another without being overly worried about tenderness. Still, his criticisms of my book Mere Natural Law ("A Moral Hazard for the Constitution," July 30, 2023) were set against the places where he accorded firmly with my line of argument. He shares my concern for the way that even conservative justices have backed into assumptions of moral relativism when dealing with the regulation of speech. What is lost here is the moral ground of a civic order. Acts of speech can become instruments of serious assault, along with any other parts of our freedom. To lose all moral limits to the use of speech is to lose as well the moral ground for defending the goodness or rightness of free speech.

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