Case: 21-51178 Document: 00516474571 Page: 17 Date Filed: 09/16/2022 No. 21-51178 861, 874–75 (2022). The first rule was central to the Speech Clause as originally understood, because the “core abuse against which it was directed was the scheme of licensing laws implemented by the monarch and Parliament to contain the ‘evils’ of the printing press in 16th- and 17-century England.” Thomas v. Chicago Park Dist., 534 U.S. 316, 320 (2002). For example, the Printing Act of 1662 required all printers to obtain a license and then “required that all works be submitted for approval to a government official, who wielded broad authority to suppress works that he found to be heretical, seditious, schismatical, or offensive.” Ibid. (quotation omitted). Licensing schemes like the Printing Act generated substantial opposition in both England and the American colonies. They disappeared in both places by the 1720s. See David S. Bogen, The Origins of Freedom of Speech and Press, 42 Md. L. Rev. 429, 443–44 (1983). Thus, Blackstone had this to say two decades before the First Amendment’s ratification: The liberty of the press is indeed essential to the nature of a free state: but this consists in laying no previous restraints upon publications, and not in freedom from censure for criminal matter when published. . . . To subject the press to the restrictive power of a licenser, as was formerly done, both before and since the revolution, is to subject all freedom of sentiment to the prejudices of one man, and make him the arbitrary and infallible judge of all controverted points in learning, religion, and government. 4 William Blackstone, Commentaries *151–52. Founding-era Americans similarly viewed the freedom from prior restraints as a central component of the freedoms of speech and the press. See Campbell, Emergence of Neutrality, supra, at 875–76; see also, e.g., 3 Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution § 1874 (1833) (“It is plain, then, that the language of [the First A]mendment imports no more, than that 17