 Before we do this, however, the reader might wish to disagree with the above claims and warn of the dangers of the “slippery slope.” As Frederick Schauer (1985) has demonstrated, slippery slope arguments make the claim that a current acceptable change (he calls this the instant case) to the status quo regarding speech will lead to some intolerable future state of affairs (what he calls the danger case) once the instant case prohibiting speech is introduced. The assumption is that the instant case is acceptable; otherwise it would be critiqued in its own right. The complaint is that a change from the status quo to the instant case will lead to unwanted future limitations on speech and should be avoided (even if a change to the instant case would be immediately desirable). The slippery slope argument has to make a clear distinction between the instant and the danger case. If the former was part of the latter then it is not a slippery slope argument but simply an assertion about the unwarranted breadth of the instant case. The claim being made is that a change to an acceptable instant case that is distinct from the danger case should nevertheless be prohibited because a change from the status quo to the instant case will necessarily transport us to the danger case. 