 What is one description of a putative right to individual self-expression?
The subject of this short book is the present direction of the law governing the freedom of speech. This is what Fiss means by the "irony" in his title: that true freedom of speech for all requires suppressing the speech of some. An irony would be the observation that an attempt to increase freedom for all often entails, despite our best efforts, a decrease in freedom for a few. But he has, instead, chosen to address the issue as an advocate for specific groups he regards as politically disadvantaged--women, gays, victims of racial-hate speech, the poor (or, at least, the not-rich), and people who are critical of market capitalism--and to design a constitutional theory that will enable those groups to enlist the state in efforts either to suppress speech they dislike or to subsidize speech they do like, without running afoul of the First Amendment. The Irony of Free Speech is a discussion of several speech issues: campaign-finance laws, state funding for the arts, pornography, speech codes, and equal time. These discussions are not doctrinaire, but their general inclination is to favor state intervention, on political grounds, in each of those areas--that is, to favor restrictions on campaign spending, greater regulation of pornography, and so on. The argument is that "the liberalism of the nineteenth century was defined by the claims of individual liberty and resulted in an unequivocal demand for liberal government, [while] the liberalism of today embraces the value of equality as well as liberty."
 The right of the donkey to drool
 The right to orthodox self-expression  The right to hate but not to be hated  The right to engage in debate unencumbered by speech laws  The right of the donkey to drool