Floyd Abrams
Floyd Abrams
Floyd Abramsis an American attorney at Cahill Gordon & Reindel. He is an expert on constitutional law, and many arguments in the briefs he has written before the United States Supreme Court have been adopted as United States Constitutional interpretative law as it relates to the First Amendment and free speech. He is the William J. Brennan Jr. Visiting Professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionLawyer
CountryUnited States of America
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It's not like learning how to hit a curve ball in baseball.
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Today's result is overdue. Mayor Giuliani should have never started this destructive fight with the First Amendment and should surely have agreed to stop it long ago.
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Where the disclosure is of newsworthy information and it is made by an entity that did not act illegally in obtaining the information, the disclosure is generally protected under the First Amendment.
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While Judy Miller sat in jail for 85 days and Mr. Libby knew that she was doing it to protect him, no call came in from him, no letter arrived from him,
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There is a great reluctance on the part of journalists..to pick up the phone and sort of badger sources into relieving them of the promises they made, especially at the time that the promises are most important, when the source is in trouble. This is a very difficult and very delicate area.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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I try to do that in this book without preaching - to try to do as you just said that you really have to defend the First Amendment rights of everybody.
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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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No other country in the world gives protection like that, but it is not absolute protection. People sometimes meet that high burden and win libel suits, and in those cases I think they ought to win.
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There are some circumstances in which the First Amendment interest comes up against another interest that is really important and in which we have to make a decision in a particular case as to which is more important.