A bare majority of the Colorado Supreme Court last week found what even the U.S. Supreme Court had never found before — a perfectly "constitutional prior restraint." In so discovering, four Colorado justices injected uncertainty into one of the few areas of constitutional law that had been completely clear. In other words, make that one less constitutional certainty.

Before the Colorado majority took pen to paper — or finger to keyboard, as it is today — there wasn’t a doubt in the legal world that the First Amendment prohibited prior restraints (commonly understood to be when the government preemptively prevents someone from speaking). It was a bright line rule. No one could prevent anyone else from publishing lawfully obtained truthful information about a matter of public importance.

The rule’s simplicity was a rare thing in this day and age when there are so few constitutional absolutes. But that simplicity served the utmost importance, providing anyone who had something to say with the promise of free speech. After all, if the First Amendment meant anything at all, it meant that prior restraints were completely off-limits. No one — not the government, not a corporation, not an individual — was entitled to preemptively silence anyone else.

That was, until a celebrity got involved.

The Colorado case involves one of the biggest names in professional sports, NBA All-Star Kobe Bryant, and the topic couldn’t have been more newsworthy, the criminal proceedings against him for sexual assault. But while a public figure’s involvement in public legal dispute usually yields both unprecedented media coverage and unlimited First Amendment protection for those covering the news, the four justices of the Colorado Supreme Court decided exactly the opposite should be true in the Bryant case. And they did so precisely because Bryant is a big celebrity and the rape case against him is even bigger news.

On July 19, the majority of the Colorado Supreme Court instructed the news media that they could not publish the transcript of a hearing held to determine which intimate details of Bryant’s accuser’s life would be admissible as evidence in Bryant’s trial. This despite the fact that the transcript is, admittedly, genuine — e-mailed to several journalists by the court reporter — and likely contains details about sexual activities of Bryant’s accuser that are already available through the mainstream media, the tabloid press or online.

Indeed, it made little difference to the four justices that the news media wanted to publish the transcript because it actually was a truthful word-for-word account of the hearing. Nor were the justices interested in the fact that the reporters had obtained the transcript lawfully, albeit through an information age accident of the court reporter’s misdirected e-mail.

Instead, the four justices dwelled on the impact Bryant’s celebrity would have on the privacy of his accuser and the amount of media coverage if they followed the usual constitutional course of allowing publication first while sorting out the consequences later. Never mind that there is no real privacy interest to be protected since all kinds of stories about the life of Bryant’s accuser, including her entire sexual history, have already been etched into the public consciousness. Never mind that Bryant’s case is already big news and will continue to be whether the transcript is released or not. Never mind that the public has a constitutionally enshrined right to be informed about this important criminal proceeding and that the press has the same right to report the news.

The four justices didn’t want to feel as if they were judicially fueling what they thought to be an already overzealous media blitz. Thus, the only possible answer for them was to put the blinders on, blocking any clear view of the real First Amendment interests at stake, so they could take control of the publicity by preventing at least some of it. In other words, the four justices’ decision was more about their profound fear of the First Amendment than it was a judicious interpretation of that bedrock constitutional guarantee. And therein lies the irreparable harm, if their decision is allowed to stand.

That massive public and media attention could actually dilute our First Amendment freedoms of speech and of the press is not new. The U.S. Supreme Court has been forced to address such concerns in case after case. But until last week, the answer, even in the inferior courts, had always been unequivocally the same: judges would not be the censors, they could only be the arbiters of what should happen after publication.

Such is the constitutional promise guaranteed by the First Amendment — free speech means, at the very least, that no one will ever be forced to remain silent. But the four justices of the Colorado Supreme Court never took that vow. Their concern was that too many people were speaking. And, in taking away just that one piece of information from those conversations, they accomplished a feat even Kobe Bryant has never achieved. They slam dunked our First Amendment.