Floyd Abrams Quotations

It just seems to be a human trait to want to protect the speech of people with whom we agree. For the First Amendment, that is not good enough. So it is really important that we protect First Amendment rights of people no matter what side of the line they are on.

I would say that the Pentagon Papers case of 1971 - in which the government tried to block the The New York Times and The Washington Post that they obtained from a secret study of how we got involved in the war in Vietnam - that is probably the most important case.

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.

I am really impressed by lawyers who write books and tell us that they never lost a case. Most lawyers who have never lost a case have not had enough hard cases. But there are very difficult cases out there.

So sometimes the facts are good and sometimes the facts are bad, the important thing from the point of view of a principle as broad and important as freedom of speech is that the courts articulate and set forth in a very protective way what those principles are.

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.

I still owe a duty of loyalty to my clients and former clients, so I cannot specify which clients I did not especially find congenial, but the cause was the same.

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.

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.

I just had the sense that at least the books that I had read about law just didn't really have enough of that.

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.

If the word gets out, if the perception exists that by speaking to a CBS journalist you are, therefore, inevitably, immediately speaking to the police, I don't think there's any doubt but that people won't talk. And, therefore, the public won't learn.

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.

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.

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.

It's not like learning how to hit a curve ball in baseball.

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.

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.

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.

I think that it is important for people to understand that whether a good-guy or a bad-guy wins a case is less important than what the law is that the case results in.

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.

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?

CBS exhausted the Texas courts. They went from the trial court to the intermediate court to the highest court.

I think that the very fact that CBS fought and fought and fought in Texas, in New York.

The principle though remains the same, and the important thing is CBS fought hard, very hard, to protect that principle and will fight again.

This is going right to the police. So, it's a very dangerous precedent.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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,

She has other sources and was very concerned about the possibility of having to reveal those sources or going back to jail because of them.

She is there (in jail) for a reason. At this time, the reason is still there. She made a promise and, unless properly released from her promise by her source, she has no choice but to continue to take the position that she's taking.

On more than one occasion, Mr. Tate asked me for a recitation of what Ms. Miller would say. I did not provide one.

Fox's decision to abandon its efforts at interfering with the sale of Al Franken's new book is welcome, if overdue. The case never should have been brought.

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.

Reporters should keep their word to their sources.

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.

Judy's view is that any purported waiver she got from anyone was not on the face of it sufficiently broad, clear and uncoerced.

will significantly lessen the risk of large media companies finding themselves in the situation that Time Inc. found itself in.

We would be defending that. Mr. Risen did a serious and solid job. He has made no apology.

First Amendment issues are always unpopular. That's why we need a First Amendment.

to assure that the only source he would effectively be asking about was Mr. Libby.

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.

Everything is being dropped. There is no more litigation about this.

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.

The story wasn't there, ... It was a mistake. It was a bad mistake, and CNN has apologized for it, as I think they should.

Telephone records are the extension of the journalist herself. Telephone records are the embodiment of the speech of the journalist and require the same protection.

coerced and had been required as a condition for Libby's continued employment at the White House.

A visitor from a distant planet might say of all of this, 'What are you doing? Why are you limiting speech about elections?' But that's what we're doing, and that's what the legislation that passed yesterday does.

At its core, ... a time had come when it was possible to resolve this. Judy had no desire to continue to endure life in the detention center.

a book is allowed to criticize a holder of a trademark and mock a trademark as well.

It seems to me one thing to criticize her for certain errors in particular coverage, but it's deeply disturbing to see so many journalists ignore or discount the significant 1st Amendment battle she has just engaged in.

I tried to get a deal a year ago.

It's troubling that reporters are being asked to play so central a role, but even more troubling that reporters may be obliged to play the role of testifying against someone that they had promised confidentiality to,

The notes were redacted to omit everything but the notes taken concerning discussions with Libby about Plame.

It was made very clear to me in discussions with Mr. Libby's counsel that he had personally approved and authorized Matthew Cooper fully to disclose everything about their conversations. I was satisfied that I had been given a direct and unequivocal assurance that Matt could testify and Libby had approved that.

The message you sent to me was viewed by Ms. Miller as inherently 'mixed,'

I know that the jail stay, which is the longest of any journalist in American history, was certainly not extended for any reason at all, ... and was served in the service of protecting her source.

That doesn't necessarily mean that the story isn't true, ... But what it does mean, then, is that at this moment we simply do not have enough evidence, in my view, for any conclusion to be reached - that the presidents have been lying to us for all these years and that what we've been told was just a pack of lies.

I can tell you, having been in court today in New York, that the requests for the video outtakes have been dropped.

I really believe that a lawyer - no matter how good - if he or she is really worth their weight in salt, they will lose some cases because, after all, it is not really one of those secretive things that not everything is decided by who your lawyer is.

I really do think that if we had lost that case we would really live in a country that would be really quite different.

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.

The government understands - every government, every administration, both parties, understands - that that power, they just don't have.