Freedom of speech the unreachable mirage

This volume is a collection of loosely connected essays focusing on major theoretical issues related to freedom of speech and the freedom of the press. The studies in the book present the problems under consideration in the context of specific cases, court decisions, and statutes and attempt to express notions that are less conventional in European legal thinking, in order to achieve both novelty and durability. The collected pieces of work attempt to find some sort of link between the two paradigms of freedom of speech prevalent on the two sides of the Atlantic that are, more often than not, extremely hard to reconcile with each other; this endeavour may be directed either at some sort of synthesis between American and European legal literature or the identification of the?usually different?answers offered to the same problems under the two paradigms.  As the author happens to live in a country where, for historical reasons, the modern concept of freedom of speech has been put into practice for scarcely more than two decades, his Central Eastern European approach, which necessarily permeates the work, may even be able to cast new light on the sometimes petrified doctrines of freedom of speech for readers from ?beyond the Iron Curtain?.