Free speech is a basic American right that is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, but the right does come with limitations, legal scholars say.

When American Nazis wanted to march in Skokie, Illinois, a community with a large population of Jewish Holocaust survivors, the U.S. Supreme Court essentially allowed it.

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“Even those have been seriously limited by the Supreme Court,” said former federal Appellate Judge Michael McConnell, the Director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School.

He said the Berkeley protesters, not the scheduled speaker, suppressed free speech.

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“The biggest threat today is other students who have somehow gotten it into their ideas that when they are offended by something that they have the right to shut down the speaker,” McConnell said.