Echoing the sentiments of Justice Felix Frankfurter when he first decried relying on reflex over reason in the Court’s treatment of free speech cases, Stanley Fish and other scholars have argued that there is “no such thing as free speech,” by which they mean that there is no principle of free speech. Fish’s attack, however, differs from the common complaint that the standard justifications offered in this country for a principled protection of speech do not tell us why speech should have a greater degree of immunity from regulation than any other form of conduct causing harm or offense, or, if these justifications do tell us why, cannot account for the extent of the current protection we now offer to speech. These are very well-known problems, and Fish is not particularly interested in them. Instead, his claim is that any justification offered for the protection of speech, any answer to the question “what is speech for,” will necessarily fail as a principled justification. To answer the question “what is speech for?” at all, he says, is to join “the regime of censors.” There will always be speech that subverts whatever purpose we attribute to speech and that speech we will not tolerate. Instead of a principle, then, what we have is a political determination, a choice between warring political policies, through which we give the name “free speech” to whatever speech serves the winner’s purposes.