ABSTRACT
In an exchange with Cass Sunstein and Frederick Schauer, the author criticized efforts to distinguish "high value" and "low value" speech, as the Supreme Court, Sunstein, and others have urged from time to time. Any particular "unit" of speech, however such a unit is individuated, may convey an indefinite number of ideas to its audience. His ideas conveyed vary depending upon what the unit of speech is taken to be, the context into which it is placed, and the audience to which it is presented. A medical textbook may be neglected by physicians but eagerly sought by those who are sexually aroused by its pictures of sexual organs; a book of "pornographic" photographs may be profitably studied by psychologists and sociologists in whom it produces no sexual arousal whatsoever. The ideas that speech evokes are not locatable in the symbols employed. Sunstein is not alone in the error of focusing on the speaker's intent in first amendment analysis.
