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The composition of the Supreme Court was a hot issue in the presidential campaign, with both parties warning of evil days if the other side gets to name the next several justices. But it's not so easy to predict the positions of Democratic or Republican court appointees, and this is especially true of free-speech opinions.

Stephen G. Breyer, for instance, a Clinton appointee, is the least likely of all nine justices to vote for a free-speech claim. The justice who takes the broadest view of free-speech rights is Anthony M.Kennedy, a Reagan appointee, followed by Clarence Thomas in a tie with fellow Bush appointee David H. Souter. Not what one might expect from reading the conventional political labels.

To compile this free-speech scorecard, I studied 33 cases decided in the last six years - involving pornography, picketing, the media and commercial speech, for example. (I chose six years because that's how long the court's membership has been unchanged.) I assigned a point for each case where a justice voted for the free-speech claimant, adjusting up by a third of a point for a separate opinion taking a more speech-protective stance than the justice's colleagues did and adjusting down by that amount for one expressing a more government-friendly view.

Rated this way, Justice Kennedy voted for free-speech claimants an adjusted 74% of the time - making him hardly an absolutist, but still a voice for broad speech protection. Justices Thomas and Souter were both at 63%, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg (a Clinton appointee) and John Paul Stevens (Ford) were virtually tied, at 58% and 57%. Antonin Scalia (Reagan) was next, at 52%, followed by Chief Justice William A. Rehnquist (Nixon) and Sandra Day O'Connor (Reagan) at 46% and 45%. Justice Breyer voted for the free-speech claimant only 40% of the time.

To be sure, generalizing from numbers about where a justice stands on "free speech" can be misleading. Justices can have plausible (and sometimes politically predictable) reasons for voting against a free-speech claim.

Justice Ginsburg, for instance, generally strongly supports free-speech claims, but thinks that private individuals' religious speech and costly election-campaign speech should be more restricted. Justice Scalia believes in strong protection for religious expression and campaign-related speech, but thinks that sexually explicit speech deserves less protection.

Still, a vote for or against a free-speech claim reaches beyond these distinctions. After all, Supreme Court decisions that curb one kind of speech tend to lead to restrictions on other kinds. The so-called slippery slope is a real concern in a legal system founded on precedents and analogies. So voters who support broad free-speech rights should feel more comfortable with the views of a Justice Kennedy, Thomas or Souter (all Republican picks) than with those of Justice Breyer - even if they disagree with the first three on specific cases.

It's just not sound to assume that the left generally sides with speakers and the right with government officials who want to curb them.

Eugene Volokh is a professor of law.