Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are the cornerstones of our representative government in the United States. We’ve expressly chosen to value freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

The first amendment to the United States Constitution reads, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

In choosing how to govern ourselves as a new nation, our founders charged themselves with the protection of these innate rights to maintain our individual and group voices, and our access to information.

In 1780, John Adams, Samuel Adams, and James Bowdoin wrote into Article XVI of Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts that “The liberty of the press is essential to the security of freedom in a state: it ought not, therefore, to be restrained in this commonwealth.”

Many see the press as the fourth branch of government, the portion that keeps the American public knowledgeable about the actions of our representatives. As Supreme Court Justice Byron White wrote in his decision in Cox Broadcasting Corp. v. Cohn, 420 U.S. 469, 491-92 (1975), “In a society in which each individual has but limited time and resources with which to observe at first hand the operations of his government, he relies necessarily upon the press to bring him in convenient form the facts of those operations. . . . Without the information provided by the press most of us and many of our representatives would be unable to vote intelligently or to register opinions on the administration of government generally.”

In other words, we need the freedom to allow a number of people, whom we call the press, to gather information about the inner workings and actions of the government in order to obtain transparency of and access to information for those who live their lives busy with other matters.

As Chief Justice Frankfurter wrote in the New York Times on November 28, 1954, “Without a free press there can be no free society…. However, freedom of the press is not an end in itself but a means to the end of a free society.”

Through statutes, regulations, and case law, the last three centuries have seen an evolution in needs for protections and constraints of these freedoms. Changes in technology and societal values have reshaped how free press and free speech work in the everyday world.

Modern day technology allows speech to be transmitted to millions of people in a matter of minutes via the internet. With that comes worries of content, veracity, and freedom of access.

Laws, made by representatives of the people in the Senate and House of Representatives, as well as case law from judges interpreting the statutes, give us the lower threshold of what we as a society have deemed unsafe speech. We may not agree with speech that does not cross this line, but we have agreed to protect the expression of those views, even if not endorsed by the majority of American public.

Speech can be morally wrong but still legal. Most would agree that hate speech is wrong, for example, but it is a protected form of speech as long as it does not reach the level of inciting violence or lawless acts.

Each branch of government, the executive, legislative, and judicial (along with the press) has taken steps to foster the safety of the public while at the same time valuing their freedom of expression by imposing only limited regulation of the content, as well as the time, place, and manner of speech. Additionally, these branches have acted in concert at times, and adversarially at others to protect the press and net neutrality.

At the end of the day, it is we, through our representative government, who choose how much of these values to hold dear. We should continue to fight for the protection of these rights, because a free society cannot exist without freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

Elizabeth Swihart is a member of the Franklin County Bar Association executive committee and works as an Assistant District Attorney at the Northwestern District Attorney’s Office.