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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Were this not Texas, were there not a state where there were no protections at all and where the law was clear on that, I think CBS and Mary Mapes and Dan Rather and all of us had a very good chance of winning. So this is an ongoing battle about an issue of principle.
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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 used to watch him practice. It was a sort of Jimmy Stewart style. Denis was a very soft-spoken, self-effacing, overly modest person who left many flashier lawyers in his wake as he persuaded judges and juries alike that what he said could be trusted and should carry the day.
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I just had the sense that at least the books that I had read about law just didn't really have enough of that.
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It is within the last quarter century or thirty years. And a lot of that law has turned out to be very, very protective of the press and the public's right to know.
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Reporters should keep their word to their sources.
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Judy was very reluctant to seem to be putting pressure on a source to release her to speak. And at the time, it would not have solved the other issue.
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Judy's view is that any purported waiver she got from anyone was not on the face of it sufficiently broad, clear and uncoerced.
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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.
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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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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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The principle though remains the same, and the important thing is CBS fought hard, very hard, to protect that principle and will fight again.
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CBS exhausted the Texas courts. They went from the trial court to the intermediate court to the highest court.
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The question at the end of the day was, the courts having found there was no defense, a producer about to go to jail, should CBS in effect tell the producer go to jail even though there is no law at all that we can use to get you out of jail?