Floyd Abrams on the struggles for the first amendment

From the book SPEAKING FREELY by renowned first-amendment litigator Floyd Abrams, published back in 2005.

He is discussing his involvement in the case of Landmark Communications v. Virginia (1978). A newspaper owned by Landmark had published an (accurate) story that a certain juvenile-court judge in that state was under investigation on a "fitness" grounds. There had not yet been a disciplinary hearing: the investigation might have concluded there was no need for one.

At this point, under Virginia law, the investigation was supposed to be confidential, for the protection of the reputation of the judge and other reasons. The newspaper was criminally prosecuted.

The matter went up to the US Supreme Court where Abrams argued. Abrams maintained that no accurate reporting about the performance of the duties of a public official can constitutionally be criminalized.

This brings us to the bit I want to quote. Abrams reports that he was discussing this case with an associate the night before his oral argument before the Justices. They speculated the Justices might ask him to discuss a hypothetical situation much like something that happened in 2022 prior to the release of the DOBBS decision. They might ask him to suppose that "a draft opinion of the Supreme Court itself had leaked to the press before it had been released to the public." [p. 67]

He decided that he would have to argue that even in that egregious situation there should be no recourse to the criminal law. "Our answer was clear enough, I would say, the publication of truthful information, lawfully acquired, about the activities of public officials could not be made criminal even if it came from the Supreme Court itself. But the thought of making that assertion to members of the Court itself was unappealing."

Landmark won the case, although the Supreme Court's decision was not as categorical as Abrams' argument for it appeared to have been.

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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