AND AMERICAN FREE SPEECH DISCOURSE

ority of the sovereign of the national community- the American people whose will the constitution represents. The Bill of Rights pro-tects the liberties of Americans. Therefore, the practice of claiming consti-tutional rights in the American context, like freedom of speech, brings into this process assumptions, counterassumptions and struggles between these conflicting assumptions, over the substance of the American people. These struggles will help constitute the regulatory norms of this imagined com-munity, and the nature of its boundaries. If the background assumption of an American rights bearing community is necessary to establish the possibility for protecting American constitutional rights in an international context in the first place, this assumption also establishes the limits of these rights in the boundaries that distinguish America from other possible peoples and places. In this essay, I explore the American constitutional right of freedom of speech and press by way of the conventional construction of the time and space coordinates associated with the emergence of a right to free speech. Th