What in heaven's name did Emma tweet -- again, not to the governor's face, but to a few friends -- that threatens the Anglo-American edifice of ordered liberty? She said of him what teenagers since time began have said to their adult rulers -- indeed, what the good of society demands they say from time to time. In the words of Lewis Carroll, her tweet meant, "Who cares for you? You're nothing but a pack of cards!" I think any American governor ought to hear this sentiment at least twice a day.

I can't help wondering whether any of these benign spirits have ever found themselves looking at the barrel of school, or state, power for the offense of saying forbidden things. I have. It was a different time and a different place, but I will never forget being told by my headmaster in 1968 that I would be expelled from school, and have my college acceptance rescinded, for making a public show of regret that Martin Luther King was dead.

It only takes one incident like that to change your view of adult "guidance" and "explanation." Because of that experience, I think, I would have said to any child of mine caught in a similar vice, "What you think and say to about politicians is your business and not theirs." Because of that experience, 40 years later, I'm a First Amendment specialist instead of holding a real job.

But as a First Amendment specialist, I think the way we treat the Emma Sullivans of the world matters quite a lot to the kind of society we build. "Talking's something you can't do judiciously," says Casper ("The Fat Man") Gutman in The Maltese Falcon, "unless you keep in practice." And more and more I wonder where Americans are supposed to keep in practice. Free speech can't take place nowhere; it needs places to be uttered and places to be heard. Adults want high schools to be speech-free zones, and more and more the courts agree. Employers want the workplace speech-free zones as well. The law supports them. Recently, the Supreme Court held that the First Amendment doesn't protect even public employees who say things on the job that their employers don't approve. During this term of the Supreme Court, lawyers for a church school argued that religious bodies should have the power to fire employees who report child sexual abuse, as required by law.

So, no training in talking while you grow up. No talking on the job once you're grown up. Take down that cheeky tweet. Clean up that Facebook page. What about college, where students are supposed to speak their minds and follow truth wherever it may lead? Well, sure, as long as it's, well, decorous. "University officials have generally bureaucratized and limited assembly and speech on campus," notes Timothy Zick of the William & Mary Law School, author of Speech Out of Doors: Preserving First Amendment Liberties in Public Places. "Many campuses have adopted 'free speech zones' and other restrictions."