The role of intentions of legal actors and legal subjects is a pervasive issue in countless areas of law. In his scholarship on freedom of expression, Larry Alexander has argued that freedom of expression adjudication is and should be centrally about the intentions of a government regulator, such that “censorial” intentions of a certain kind are both the necessary and sufficient conditions for a violation of the principle of freedom of expression. And in discussing the interpretation of statutes and the Constitution, Alexander has argued that the intentions of the drafters or enactors are again the touchstone for the interpretive enterprise. This essays argues that Alexander is correct about the former and mistaken about the latter. Freedom of expression is indeed about governmental intentions, but interpreting the law starts (and sometimes ends) with conventional meaning, with the intentions of the drafters or enactors playing at most a contingent and decidedly nonprimary role.