pThe liberty of written and spoken expression has been fixed in the firmament of our social values since our nation's beginning--the government of the United States was the first to legalize free speech and a free press as fundamental rights. But when the British began colonizing the New World, strict censorship was the iron rule of the realm any words, true or false, that were thought to disparage the government were judged a criminally subversive--and duly punishable--threat to law and order. Even after Parliament lifted press censorship late in the seventeenth century, printers published what they wished at their peril.ppSo when in 1733 a small newspaper, the emNew-York Weekly Journalem, printed scathing articles assailing the new British governor, William Cosby, as corrupt and abusive, colonial New York was scandalized. The paper's publisher, an impoverished printer named John Peter Zenger with a wife and six children, in fact had no hand in the paper's vitriolic editorial content-