Floyd Abrams

(21 votes)   The government would be able to go to court with respect to newspaper articles, broadcast pieces and the like that they thought were bad or harmful or even against the government and try to block them.

Floyd Abrams
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(104 votes)   It's a competing interest that matters.

Floyd Abrams
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(99 votes)   My role in it was not as central as it was in some of the later cases considering I was younger then and I was playing a role of co-counsel on the case.

Floyd Abrams
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(90 votes)   I know a lot of reporters certainly will go to jail to defend confidential sources. Some have even gone to jail for an issue like this. But I can't say that's the norm.

Floyd Abrams
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(89 votes)   I thought I could do that by telling stories of some of the cases that established those principles on a real life on the ground basis.

Floyd Abrams
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(84 votes)   I think we have some serious problems now, but, if you look back over the last thirty or forty years that my book deals with, I think we are in better shape now than we would have been if all of those cases had not come down.

Floyd Abrams
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(50 votes)   It has something to do with the facts and the law and who the judges are. So I think lawyers sometimes exaggerate their role in winning and losing. Lawyers do have a role, and a major role, but they're not the only players in this game.

Floyd Abrams
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(48 votes)   CBS fought very hard on this because it believed and believes that there's a principle at stake here. The principle is that Dan Rather doesn't work for the police, and that people that speak to Dan Rather understand that he's a journalist and not a police agent.

Floyd Abrams
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(46 votes)   I really try at least to come back and answer the question as to whether that was really the best way to do that and was I really thinking straight and how did my opponents behave and how did the judges behave was needed.

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(46 votes)   When I began we did not really have a lot of First Amendment law. It is really surprising to think of it this way, but a lot of the law - most of the law that relates to the First Amendment freedom of the press in America - is really within living memory.

Floyd Abrams
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(45 votes)   I just had the sense that at least the books that I had read about law just didn't really have enough of that.

Floyd Abrams
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(45 votes)   I mean the idea of this is that it's a good thing for the public to hear interviews like this and that there will be an inevitable amount of fewer interviews if people that the press talks to wind up thinking, well, it's not really a CBS correspondent.

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(45 votes)   I really did try to write it so that an educated public that cares about issues like this doesn't have to be a lawyer and can read it and understand it.

Floyd Abrams
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(43 votes)   Here we have a situation where a defendant in a case agrees to an interview with Dan Rather. It happened to be not confidential. But it was an interview with Dan Rather.

Floyd Abrams
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(40 votes)   It is not to benefit CBS, not to benefit its reporters. On this one, the entire basis of it is this is a way to get more information, more important information to the public. And that's why so many states recognize this.

Floyd Abrams
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