Although the text of the First Amendment speaks only of liberty, not equality, since the early twentieth century, the Supreme Court has recognized that implicit in the guarantee of freedom of speech is a guarantee of expressive equality. Today, equality plays a tremendously important role in First Amendment law. There is significant debate, however, both on and off the Court, about what it means to say that the First Amendment guarantees to individuals not only expressive liberty but expressive equality—or what the Court described at one point as “equality of status in the field of ideas” In this talk, I discuss the two conceptions of equality that inform free speech law and argue that one of the most important features of the Roberts Court’s approach to First Amendment questions is its embrace of a formal, as opposed to a substantive, conception of expressive equality. The formalism of the Court’s conception of expressive equality helps explain, I argue, many of the curious features of its free speech jurisprudence, but remains highly contested.