If you associate the First Amendment more with the rarified air of constitutional debate, or powdered wigs and colonial days, try thinking in more modern terms — say speed traps and blinking headlights.

For most of us, much of the Bill of Rights comes into play infrequently, if ever. A few examples: According to a 2013 survey, only one in three U.S. households are home to a firearm (Second Amendment). And thankfully, protection in our lifetimes against illegal search and seizure (Fourth) or self-incrimination (Fifth) will be more legal theory rather than active tool.

But the First Amendment — the nation’s “blue collar” amendment — goes to work every day alongside us. We regularly, if not daily, use the freedoms of religion, speech, press, assembly and petition to worship as we will, to speak our minds freely, and to ask our elected leaders to make changes on matters of public interest.

There are disputes over the way we apply those core freedoms, sometimes reaching the U.S. Supreme Court. But at other times, the legal collision and decision are more down-to-earth and closer to home. Case in point, Michael J. Elli challenged a city ordinance in his hometown, Ellisville, Mo., that permitted police to ticket drivers who flashed headlights to warn oncoming motorists approaching a speed trap.

About 2:50 p.m. on Nov. 17, 2012, Elli flashed his headlights after passing police. He was stopped and ticketed. Elli faced a $1,000 fine, and later was warned by a municipal judge about a charge of “obstruction of justice.”

The city dropped the prosecution after Elli pled not guilty, and later said it ordered police not to enforce the law. Nonetheless, Elli proceeded with a federal lawsuit. In early February, U.S. District Judge Henry Autrey issued an order to make certain he stopped the “chilling effect” on citizens exercising their First Amendment right of free speech.

Judge Henry’s ruling makes the important point that Missouri law forbids someone from warning of “impending discovery or apprehension,” but specifically excludes telling someone to comply with the law. In other words, communicating “slow down” is protected speech because it encourages safer driving.

An attorney for Elli from the American Civil Liberties Union, Tony Rothert, told The Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog that there was a higher principle involved, too: With rare exception, the police shouldn’t be stopping or prosecuting people because of the content of their speech.

As it happens, along with headlight warnings, other courts have protected a range of “speech,” from the spoken word to expressive conduct, where government may not prosecute.

While it may be rude to do so, and may well mean a risk of arrest before later exoneration, courts have said people can confront police officers using insulting words, hand and finger gestures to a degree more than they could similarly challenge other “civilians.” In City of Houston v. Hill, in 1999, the U.S. Supreme Court noted “a properly trained officer may reasonably be expected to exercise a greater degree of restraint than the average citizen” to such expressive conduct.

The point is not that courts are encouraging us to be insulting or disrespectful to police or other authorities — rather that government, from the lowest to highest official in the land, cannot override our right to speak freely without presenting good reason rooted in law.

In Houston, Justice William J. Brennan wrote that “the right of individuals verbally to oppose or challenge police action without thereby risking arrest is one of the principal characteristics by which we distinguish a free nation from a police state. … The First Amendment recognizes, wisely we think, that a certain amount of expressive disorder not only is inevitable in a society committed to individual freedom, but must itself be protected if that freedom would survive.”

We traditionally celebrate freedom with fireworks on July 4, Independence Day. Maybe an occasional flick or two of the high-beams is in order, too.

Gene Policinski is chief operating officer of the Newseum Institute and senior vice president of the Institute’s First Amendment Center. [email protected]

American university students this spring are still using printed textbooks far more than eTexts. In 2010, it was predicted that eTexts would rise from 2 percent of college course materials to over 18 percent after 2014. It didn’t happen.

In the study “Student Reading Practices in Print and Electronic Media” to be published in the journal College & Research Libraries in September of 2014, researchers tracked the reading habits of juniors, seniors and graduate students at the College of New York. Although students used electronic media for non-academic reading, they relied on paper for academics.

There are “a lot of misconceptions about Millennials” as a digital generation, according to researcher Nancy Foasberg who led the study. The Chronicle of Higher Education reported on Foasberg’s research: “Several students in Ms. Foasberg’s study expressed a distaste for digital textbooks. Some who had used e-books said they would not use them again because they found the embedded links distracting and because they could not interact with the content as they could with print texts—highlighting or taking notes in the margins, for instance. And since the students found themselves printing out digital texts, whatever money they had saved by not buying printed copies was largely lost to printing costs.”

Another writer, Ferris Jabr, details the extensive research over the last two years that confirms the science behind students’ intuitive preference for printed text. In the November 2013 issue of Scientific American, Jabr lays out the shortcomings of reading from screens in “Why the Brain Prefers Print.” Summarizing recent research from Tufts University, Indiana University, University of Stavanger (Norway), Karlstad University (Sweden), Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, University of Leicester, University of Central Florida and San Jose State University, the downsides of reading on-screen are piling up.

Research indicates that the brain treats words as physical objects which have a placement on a page but are fleeting on screen. Measures of brain activity are high when a student writes letters by hand, but not when they are typed. Many of us experience “drifting away” while scrolling. Research shows that scrolling promotes shallow reading and reduces comprehension. Text provides us with both “deep reading” and context.

Reading printed text is “less taxing cognitively” and provides us with “more free capacity for comprehension.” Reading on the Kindle “ink” format that imitates paper is less taxing than reading the backlit screens of other readers, cell phones, tablets and computer screens. Indeed, most readers report higher levels of stress, eye strain, and scrolling that “drains more mental resources.”

Researchers found that screens promote browsing, taking shortcuts, and scanning. Readers of print are much more likely to re-read and check for understanding.

For college students, the bottom line is: “Will the format affect my test scores?” Researchers found that “…volunteers using paper scored about 10 percentage points higher…students using paper approached the exam with a more studious attitude than their screen-reading peers….” Under both modes, students could superficially “remember” but those studying printed text “knew with certainty,”a trait likely related to the deep-reading of print.

Will the next “digital generation” avoid this difference and be better adapted to screens? Even with young children, researchers found the screens got in the way. Children were distracted into fiddling with the knobs on the device and otherwise being distracted by the technology.

Despite a decade of hype, American college students appear to agree with the survey of students at the National Autonomous University of Mexico where 80 percent of students preferred print to screen in order to “understand with clarity.”

You might agree, as well. After all, you could be reading this complex summary in print.

John Richard Schrock is a professor at Emporia State University.