Free speech is always constrained by legal limits and secrecy practices

Evidence

But these performatives are not open equally to everyone because the domain of free speech is always shaped by preestablished limits. These include formal legal limitations to free speech in liberal democracies (libel, slander, copyright, patent, and so forth), as well as conventional practices of secrecy (confidentiality) without which politics, business, and morality would collapse in any society. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 898

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to liberal political theory debates on free speech and to the reader’s broader interests in how institutions shape discourse. — connects to: Free speech claims now undermine most democratically enacted regulation. — Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise…, 211