Turning Back the Free Speech Recession

The Future of Free Speech by Jacob Mchangama and Jeff Kosseff is an ambitious book written with no little fervour by manifestly well-intentioned authors. But it is also an odd book which, in the end, does not always convince. Partly this is due to its privileging of breadth over depth. There is no questioning the book’s impressive reach. The US, Canada, Taiwan, Brazil, India, Russia, China, New Zealand, France, Germany, the UK, and the European Union are all packed into its 320 pages. Rather too frequently, though, we touch down in these places only for the briefest of moments before taking off again, without having properly got our bearings or fully understood what it is we came to see. When we rush around like this, mistakes can be made, details missed, context ignored, nuance overlooked.