PB: Floyd Abrams, thanks for being on the show, for people who don’t know you, they should understand, that you have been described i think correctly as perhaps the greatest most accomplished advocate for the first amendment, 00:17 in the country, or at least the most prolific practitioner of law that relates to the first amendment in the country going back several decades

FA: That’s very nice I think it’s fair

PB: Why’d you pick the first amendment, why not the ninth amendment

FA: I didn’t really pick it in fact when i was in college as an undergraduate at cornell i wrote a senior thesis basically advocating the adoption of the sorted english system of law dealing with the press with the way that works out is that if there’s a trial on and you publish something which is outside the record of what occurs at the trial 01:01 like a confession or prior criminal record, you go to jail. and journalists do, still, go to jail for that. they’re much more restrictive they impose a balance very differently than we do but in any event that’s where i was then and by chance i went to a law firm k hill gordon that represented 01:26 NBC and by chance in the 1960’s particularly under president nixon, 01:33 there were more and more subpoenas served on the press and so i came into it at a time which was an important time in our history and a very significant time for me.

 

PB: So did your views about the first amendment change or did you just start representing a particular kind of client? who needed you to make a particular kind of argument about the first amendment.

 

FA: No my views really did change, for one thing i’d never met a journalist before

 

PB: That’s not possible today

 

FA: No it’s not possible and it was also at the time of enormous conflict we have in some ways similar conflict today but different in other respects but during the war in vietnam under a president who i together with lots of other people, thought was imposing 02:25 dangerous norms on the publica nd on his position as president, and so it wasn’t hard for me to both learn about it and be an advocate for he press.

 

PB: You’ve said in the past, speaking about presidents and their relationship with the press, and that’s much of the debate that’s going on these days including on this show we’ve had a lot of journalists on, you said once presidents of the united states are rarely fond of the press. has that been historically true?

 

FA: Absolutely, absolutely

 

PB: Going back to when?

 

FA: I mean even the ones…I mean  washington were sort of heroic in all sorts of ways he didn’t talk about the press much, but adams hated the press 03:08 my favorite jefferson line wa when he wrote to someone and he said newspapers ought to be divided into four parts, truths probabilities possibilities and lies 03:23 and he said the lies part would probably fill most of the paper. now that’s our hero who wrote the declaration of independence and who is very responsible for having a bill of rights in the first place but uh presidents always feel misrepresented rarely if ever have praised the press 03:45 teddy roosevelt tried to put a pulitzer, the great publisher, in jail

 

PB: Putting this in historical context, and there are degrees, obviously it depends on the time and there are many more examples i know you’ve written about , with respect to presidents and their relationships with the press, so today there’s an antagonistic relationship to say the least between the current president and the press so should we not be alarmed at all based on this historical context?

 

FA: No I think we should be alarmed

 

PB: So should we have been alarmed throughout all of history?

 

FA: The way it’s different i think is this, first we’ve never had a president who is so  obsessed by how he was covered in the press, and we’ve never had a president who engaged in a sort of daily denigration of the press 04:34 over and over again often in the same words denouncing as fake news even when there’s not argument about it being accurate or not but really meaning not the point not what i want you to print no why would you 04:53 say all these bad things about me et cetera while this president has not sought legislation against the press 05:03 and has not caused the indictment of any press representatives, teddy roosevelt did that, i think it’s probably still more of the danger because there’s never been one as angry and as consistently 05:19 upset at the way he’s covered when he said one of the first things he was going to do was change the libel 05:28 law put aside that he can’t for various reasons we can talk about if you want. no we don’t have presidents that run for office saying that

 

PB: You said once donald trump, quote, may be the greatest threat to the first amendment since the passage of the sedition act in 1798

 

FA: That was foolish of me, looking back on it that was before he took office and i should have waited.

 

PB: But what do you think of that statement now

 

FA: I think it’s overstated in terms of what has happened so far. am i concerned, yes, i took him too literally when he said one of his first things he was going to do was change the libel law put aside that he can’t for various reasons we can talk about if you want, we don’t have presidents that run for office saying that, and saying other things that he wants to do by way of limitation on the press 06:26 and i was concerned that someone who says things like that might follow up

 

PB: Well there’s still three years left.

 

FA: Yeah.

 

PB: The bottom line of the issue of change to the libel laws, there’s not really any way that this president or any other president can cause that to happen, in your view?

 

FA: I don’t really think so for one thing, we don’t have a federal libel law, there is no united states libel law, we have fifty states that have libel laws, 06:56 so there’s nothing to amend there’s nothing to change it would take a brand new for the first time in american history, federal libel law but beyond that the reason that people like president trump, mr. trump in his earlier days 07:18 find it difficult to recover in libel cases apart from the fact that very often the truth has been told about them, 07:26 is that under american libel law as affected by the first amendment you can’t win a libel case if you’re a public figure or a public official unless you prove both that what was said is not true AND that the speaker knew it or suspected it wasn’t true 07:50 that’s a very major change in the law it was adopted in 1964 and reaffirmed by the supreme court ever since then and it was very first amendment protective, but it does make it harder for a donald trump to win a libel suit 08:07 and makes it impossible for a state to change its libel law unless you change the first amendment

 

PB: Wait why do you think donald trump says things like that when it’s really not a possible thing to do? Is he trying to have a chilling effect?

 

FA: my guess is that he’s been told he can’t win a libel case even though people have said things about him that aren’t true and he finds it impossible to accept

 

PB: And frustrating

 

FA: Totally frustrating i mean he’s used the libel law occasionally to punish speakers  he sued the chicago tribune for an architectural 08:46 review that they had said he was going to build the biggest building in new york. their critic said, that’s the silliest thing i’ve ever heard of, and trump sued.

 

PB: Well there’s nothing stopping you from suing, that’s the thing. ultimately you may have almost zero chance of success but you can still hurt people by suing them. 09:04

 

FA: Right and the chicago tribune had to spend in those days, 60,000 dollars defending that case even though i understand that’s pocket change but it’s big money too 09:21 and when you sue an individual the individual very often doesn’t have insurance and has a lot of trouble defending him or herself.

 

PB: Why is it important from the perspective of the supreme court and for our law for public figures to have less protection than ordinary people

 

FA: Basically because there’s nothing more important by way of speech, than speech critical of the government. that’s what the first amendment protects most of all. 09:48 in most clearly of all and most historically rooted of all, is that you’re allowed to say anything about the government, the government can’t sue you like new york city, chicago, can’t bring a lawsuit, chicago tried once, 10:02 back in the 1920’s and again all of that is because that sort of speech, speech about people in power, the government itself, and the like, is the most important sort of thing that needs protection. 10:18

 

PB: You were involved famously in the pentagon papers case. Did you see the movie, the post?

 

FA: Yes i have

 

PB: Are you annoyed that it’s mostly about the washington post and not the new york times?

 

FA: Yes i am

 

PB: You are? (both laugh) I wasn’t sure

 

FA: More than that, i mean it’s a good movie.

 

PB: You would have preferred the movie about the new york times

 

FA: It doesn’t have to be about the times but…it does seem to me that the movie is basically true about what the washington post did but the reality remains that the post wasn’t a big player 10:51 it didn’t matter much in the pentagon papers case it’s not just that the times had the pentagon papers for three months, worked on them, checked them out for both authenticity and that it wouldn’t be harmful to national defense and the like but that the case was a new york times 11:13 case the post came to it when the times was enjoined a court order barred them from publishing while the court looked at the facts of the case and daniel ellsberg, who was the 11:29 source of the pentagon papers provided the washington post with some of them, and other newspapers, with other parts of this 7,000 page study that has been commissioned by defense secretary mcnamara, so the post role was simply not very great i think that while the movie tries to acknowledge the times was first and talks about the competitive feelings at the post about the times it’s really hard to make a  movie that tells The Story through the vision 12:11 the visage of the washington post

 

PB: Let’s talk about the rest of the story a little bit

 

PB: In your role in one of the most important cases in this area in modern times, the new york times versus the united states, how did you get involved as an advisor, legal advisor to the new york times on the question of whether or not they could publish the pentagon papers

 

FA: Well first i was not involved in the decision making process i had never represented the times, my firm did represent NBC though, we were working on another press case the issue of confidential sources of journalists 12:52 and large entities in the press, the new york times, cbs and nbc and abc and other all decided to have one brief before the supreme court on that issue and we agreed to retain a law school professor of time named alexander bickel 13:12 and i gave a lunch and he came to the lunch and he spoke but by purest chance it was the day after the pentagon papers started to be published 13:21 and so everyone wanted to talk about that and so bickle and i with what i’ve always thought of as the enormous self confidence of lawyers without clients 13:32 mouthed off about how president nixon would never go to court 13:37 because the pentagon papers weren’t bad about him and how the times would obviously win because we didn’t have prior restraints on speech in america, we didn’t know that the times lawyers had told them they would lose 13:54 they would lose their television licenses, people would go to jail at the highest level of the times and we certainly didn’t know and the times didn’t know 14.04 that that night when the government announced it was going to go to court that law firm told the times they would  not represent them and so the times

 

PB: Because what, because they thought it would be an unpatriotic act?

 

FA: I don’t think that was the reason i think we now know because president nixon taped himself and the like 14:20 that law firm was asked by attorney general john mitchell, not to do the case and so the times found itself as one author later put it,  like a vicar found in a house of ill repute at midnight without a lawyer 14:39 and here bickle and i had been so confident and so sure as you can only be without a client and they retained us and that’s how it began

 

PB: can you comment on that, because i’m curious as a lawyer, although i don’t have any clients at the moment either, so i can speak with confidence if i want about certain things, the call from the attorney general to the private lawyer at the time 15:02 saying don’t bring this case, what do you make of that?

 

FA: I’m not upset at that i don’t think it was improper but maybe i’m just happy so happy that the law firm

 

PB: That you got to do the case.

 

FA: didn’t do the case and i gotta do it

 

PB: That’s one thing about lawyers right

 

FA: Well what do you think are you offended by it?

 

PB: You  know it’s an interesting question there’s a lot of things that get written about where the story is someone in government called someone else in government outside of government and said do this or don’t do that 15:38 and the devils in the details so i don’t know, and i haven’t studied this closely and maybe you know, but if the call was look you should just understand that in good faith i’m telling you this is terrible for the country it’s not a good idea and your firm will fall into disrepute and i’m persuading you at arms length not to bring this case that’s one thing at the other end of the spectrem, fi the call was, listen you’re dead in this town the president is going to do everything he can to make sure that clients don’t come to you and ambassadorships won’t go to your partners and all sorts of other manner of using carrot and stick then that’s a whole different story. so i don’t know

 

FA: And i don’t know the reality of it, i can imagine it was a very short call, that is to say that neither of your hypotheticals was there because the relationship was close between the law firm and people in the administration.

 

PB: It’s a scary thing 16:38 i presume when you are in the media and the government says through a white house or a cia director or an attorney general and they say at least initially, if you do that, if you publish that national security will be compromised, if you publish that as they sometimes say, people will die, don’t you care 17:03 about america, i’m guessing and (unintelligible) people in the public think, that’s a moment where you pause

 

FA: Oh i think that’s right and that’s really one of the reasons why the times spent all those months preparing those stories, interviewing former cia former defense department people about particular parts of these pentagon papers to see if they could harm national security 17:29 but beyond that i think we’re in the middle of the war there are american POWs being held, secret, always secret and never successful talks win which we were helped by our allies to see if we could end the war 17:45 that was one of the major arguments made by the government in the case was that it would be it would embarrass our allies and turned out to be canada and australia 17:54 were doing their best to talk somehow to the north vietnamese to see if something could be worked out now the courts held that diplomatic embarrassment is not enough. 18:09 to lead to suppression of free expression and that’s a very important part of the ruling i think but that doesn’t mean that a newspaper doesn’t have enormous or at least that a  newspaper ought not to consider very seriously the potential harm that publication can do

 

PB: On the one hand you’re saying that the responsible journalists, the new york times, or whoever else in the race of a request not the publish something on the state ground that it would harm national security, it’s incumbent on the media outlet 18:50 to be responsible careful evaluate it in good faith, right, but you’re also saying well some people don’t have any business doing that because they don’t have the experience but they might still call themselves journalists particularly now 19:04 when there’s a proliferation of journalists including people like julian assange 19:08 how are we supposed to figure out who has the wherewithal to question a government request to keep something secret or not.

 

FA: I think this is one of these areas where certain risks inherently come with the sort of freedom that we have and one of the risks is that people will either make bad judgements 19:31 or in my view no judgements and simply go ahead and publish and we’re in a very different world now in terms of modern nature of communication where sometimes it’s almost easier for the press because everything is coming out anyway because the circumstances of their getting information 19:59 is that tis’ going to be on the internet tomorrow.

 

PB: Again, in my much smaller universe not necessarily involving 20:04 a war, an outlet would say we understand what you’re saying we understand that we would harm the investigation and harm the ability to hold people accountable and maybe money would disappear that was meant for victims, we get it but you know what these other guys are also hot on the trial and we can’t be beaten by them. that seems to me to be not so good for the public

 

FA: No and that’s not a good argument either i mean it’s an honest argument because

 

PB: People made it, people made it

 

FA: because yeah but i mean it’s honest in that that’s just what they were thinking, it’s that they’ll be beaten and what’s the point of getting beaten, one thing that’s real in the movie the post 20:48 is that i think it makes clear that what ben bradley wanted was to be a great newspaper and to beat the times.

 

PB: Right, competition factors in everything

 

FA: SO i mean there was an enormous maybe 100% of that around i mean now, what would happen now with the pentagon papers, 7,000 pages is nothing. snowden had millions and if a newspaper knew that it was about to all appear they might not have gone through and let me say i don’t’ approve of this and i don’t mean the times on this either, but a newspaper might well decide 21:34 we don’t have to talk to the government, there’s nothing to talk about the information is virtually out we’ll do our news stories and hope for the best.

 

PB: And because no good deed goes unpunished so if you withhold it comes out anway the harm is done, we might as well do it in our way the more responsible way that’s the argument.

 

FA: And again i don’t view it as an acceptable argument in circumstances in which human life is at risk, or serious national security consequences can occur.

 

PB: Do you think reporters 22:12 should ever receive a subpoena from the government?

 

FA: Yes i mean i can imagine circumstances

 

PB: Are you going to get in trouble for saying that?

 

FA: Yes. That’s something about age, this is where being a little older helps,

 

FA: And it’s just audio, maybe no one will hear it 22:28

 

PB: They won’t see it, that’s for certain

 

FA: But i mean look there are genuine national security interest sand there are situations in which the exposure 22:43  of a leaker is in the national interest and one example that i’ve cited often about, thought about often with snowden is one which there was no great risk of enormous harm but in which i still think there was no justification for him to release it and that was a secret agreement between the united states, norway and denmark for joint surveillance of russia in a variety of ways, airplane, 23:18 political people on the scene and the like. the treaty had never been announced, it was supposed to be secret and it was just sort of willy nilly made available and the last time i looked this had never been published here because it wasn’t that interesting here 23:39 but it was published in the scandinavian countries, it confirmed what i suspect the russians may already have known couldn’t’ have been sure of and in that case my view is that there’s 23:52 no justification for snowden in effect to have made it public it would have raised, for me at least, if i were a journalist  not as a lawyer advising a journalist, 24:04 but as a journalist some really hard questions about whether this is the sort of thing we ought to be publishing.

 

PB: I think one of the first ways that you and i had any interaction 24:14 was a decade ago when i was in the senate working for senator schumer he and senator specter and some others had proposed a bill to enact into legislation the privilege reporter’s shield. do you believe, i guess not based on what you just said, 24:29 that there should be an absolute privilege, how do you balance the need for free flow of information against the need for national security. 24:37  in this particular context.

 

FA: I think the presumption ought to be, not just that the press has a right to publish, but that journalists have a right to promise confidentiality, there are issues as to who is a journalist and who not

 

PB: It’s hard to define 24:54

 

FA: And it is hard to define, that was one of the biggest sticking points

 

FA: I know and all the states have tried because just about every state now has a shield law or if it doesn’t have a shield law the courts have found shield protection for the press i think the last number i saw was like 49 25:16 every state by wyoming i think. no my answer is i don’t think there are  no circumstances in which a journalist, in which a sopena, what secrets of certain weapons? for example? certain plans? secret plans? responding to certain activities? but the fact that there’s a problem doesn’t meant that we can just escape the issue, the problem i most of the time the issue revealed has not done harm by any way of looking at it, i took a look ten years after the pentagon case to try to answer the question as follows, a majority on the supreme court, including justices who voted for us, believe publication would do harm would likely do harm 26:15 including justice douglass including justice stewart including those whose votes we desperately needed in order to win the case their view was the government had improved with sufficient clarity and the like that they would do harm but they thought it likely would do harm so i thought i would take a look and see if it did so i simply re interviewed the government witnesses, to ask them if they thought any harm would come and none of them thought that there would be any harm in fact and a few of them thought it was a good thing we had the litigation and helped to establish or reestablish how hard it is for the government to win such a case. 26:59

 

PB: I think people don’t always think of the idea of free speech, when they think of free speech they often say you know free speech is always good and it always brings a benefit but there is speech that does harm, but the analysis often is there may be more harm to democracy and the country overall if we suppress speech so for example an issue 27:24 that some people struggle with in the country particularly lately, is hate speech, there are some democratic countries in the world that criminalize hate speech right

 

FA: ALmost all, almost all democratic countries do, 27:35

 

PB: So if you walk into the street you hurl racial epithets at a person or simply say them out loud at a rally you can go to prison for that in other democratic countries

 

FA: In canada in england

 

PB: our neighbors to the north 27:50

 

FA: Yeah

 

PB: Whose system is better in that regard?

 

FA: I think for us our system is better, canada had a case in their supreme court a few years ago in which a religious zealot was very concerned very upset very angry because the schools, high schools in saskatchewan were about to teach about homosexuality. he printed on single pages a denunciation of the school board saying they were going to teach buggery they were going to reach this they were going to teach that, a number of overtly anti gay slurs 28:28 in this material and he put it in mailboxes around town. he was convicted in canada of a crime of defaming a group a discrete group of people, he had to pay a fine 28:46 for it he didn’t go to jail but he was convicted, a canadian supreme court upheld the finding and you know, we have cases here where the westboro baptist church parades outside of churches 29:03 as close as the police will let them come, 29:08 when american soldiers are being mourned who have been killed in afghanistan or iraq with signs denouncing the soldiers 29:17 the dead soldiers and mainly focusing on this is god’s punishment because america is too favorable oriented towards gay people and it was a good thing they say that the soldier is dead. it goes to US Supreme court the chief justice writes an opinion says speech of this sort is 29:39 especially protected, not unprotected, protected by the first amendment because it deals with a public issue gays in the military. the role of gays in american life. the chief justice said we don’t allow the suppression of such speech. it’s not that canada isn’t a free country or that western europe is in chains but we’ve chosen a different path in part because our history, or what we take to be our history, 30:12 has led us to be much more concerned and afraid of government and we even look abroad for our lessons about what happens if government is too empowered to affect speech, european countries have a very different views and a different history.

 

PB: You’ve represented some folks who have engaged in hate speech, what is that like for you personally, what kind of hate speech gets directed at you for example

 

FA: Well fortunately my role in hate speech cases has been more as a commenter than counsel that’s not easy i mean i’ve had it in some ways easier than a lot of other people who’ve sort of toiled in the first amendment vineyards i haven’t represented pornographers i haven’t represented a lot of the people who have said some of the worst things that our supreme court has said the first amendment protects i haven’t been accused quite as often as other

 

PB: Is that by happenstance you haven’t represented those people or have you declined representations of that

 

FA: I occasionally have had to decline representations on a life is too short basis

 

PB: I was going to ask you what the basis was, so every once in a while there’s someone who has a potentially legitimate first amendment claim

 

FA: I don’t’ have to represent them all

 

PB: So how do you choose which ones you do and don’t?

 

FA: I don’t have rules i have instincts i try not to do it on the basis that i’ll only take the new york times or great responsible institutions 31:59 there are situations in which it’s  not so much that i stay away because they are so awful, although those situations have existed, maybe it’s a cop out, i don’t think so, you know i’m busy so i can choose if i were just sitting around either do the case or you don’t all i’m doing is sort of acknowledging that there are cases i’d just as soon not be the lawyer and look there are people who think that my representation in the citizens united case 32:39

 

PB: I was about to get to that

 

FA: Was worse than any than any pornography case.

 

PB: That was my segua, there are, you have a lot of people, erstwhile liberal allies and friends and others who think that citizens united is a terrible supreme court decision the senator that i used to work for felt that way, can you just summarize in a sentence or to what that case was?

 

FA: Well it’s a case that rose out of a conservative group which receives some sum, not really that much, but some funding from uh corporations and was itself in the corporate format that did an hour long hit job on hillary clinton when she was seeking the democratic nomination which then senator obama `wound up winning and it was an hour filled with 33:32 why she shouldn’t be president and why she shouldn’t be trusted and that’s (unintelligible) earlier question, i mean that was an interesting case for me in a lot of ways and one of those was that i’ve always admired hillary clinton but my view 33:48 from the start was we had a statue which made it a crime for that program to be on television cable or satellite within 60 days of an election or 30 days of a primary my reaction was how could that possibly be how could that possibly be, a piece of direct political advocacy about who ought to to be president was criminalized and it did not persuade me that because the speaker was a corporation or had some corporate funding that that was an appropriate basis for moving away from what would obviously have been well decided first amendment law now in part that’s because i have represented a lot of corporations claiming first amendment rights that are not newspapers or broadcasters i represented barnes and noble when mcken (?) star subpoenaed them to turn over information about what book monica lewinsky gave to president clinton 34:56 and we took the position that a bookstore had first amendment rights not to reveal that information, i’ve represented universities, all of them are corporations

 

PB: WHat happened with the barnes and noble case?

 

FA: We won that, one of these sort of unreported district court, here’s the answer guys, go home, unappealable because it barely existed in the literature. so you know a lot of my work has been representing companies corporations including some for profit corporations.

 

PB: The argument on the part of a lot of people who i think are people of good faith and care about democracy and there’s various aspects of democracy to care about right there’s the right to free speech there’s a right to direct election, there’s a right to particip- there’s all sorts of things and there are some people who say the consequence of citizens united is that there’s  a thumb on the scale for rich people and for corporations 36:00 and they have an undue advantage in democracy. how do you respond to that.

 

FA: First I do think rich people with more money do have more power, i don’t think that’s deniable it’s also true that at a time when newspapers reign supreme in the country in terms of delivering news 36:20 certain newspapers particularly in one newspaper towns had enormous power played a very major role in who was elected my view is that the form the speaker takes shouldn’t be the deciding issue and incidentally we do have a lot of data now showing that the one thing people feared most from citizens united 36:46 which was corporate control of the political process has simply not occurred, 36:51 if for no other reason than that corporations are not spending vast amounts of money supporting candidates. individuals are. 37:02 wealthy individuals are if you look for example at the 2015 2016 records that the federal election commission keeps as i have you see that in those two years of all the federal election that approximately one million dollars was given to super PACs by individuals, about a quarter of a billion by unions and other groups and 80 million by corporations so it has not been corporations that have led by any means the spending of money in elections now that does not answer the broader egalitarian question 37:51 of what we should do about the fact that some people have so much more money than others, the Koch brothers from example they do spend on elections they also spend it on you know trying to affect legislation and trying to affect a variety of things i don’t think that the way to deal with that is to limit speech, if we want to step in in a variety of economic ways taxation or other ways, antitrust laws, that’s one thing but to say that because you have more money, even a lot more  money 38:34 that you shouldn’t be able to spend it on that which the first amendment protects the most, political speech is unacceptably dangerous and i thought 38:45 and think and the supreme court thinks, inconsistent with the first amendment.

 

PB: When you go to events, dinners, cocktail parties.

 

FA: Yes, the answer is yes

 

PB: And people disagree with you on this point do you engage them or do you save those arguments for court.

 

FA: Yes

 

PB: And how does that go for you.

 

FA: Oh I hear it a lot, 39:07 a lot from my  liberal friends a sort of, how could you, i’ve spoken a lot on campuses, i usually bring the film of the movie with me, which is a very strong from my side because whatever else it is, it is the quintessential political speech, 39:27 i mean all it is is how terrible hillary clinton is and why you shouldn’t vote for her. there always going to be losses as well as gains by allowing more speech. hate speech does harm 39:46 other sorts of speech do have adverse effects on the public. the lack of equality on the country leads to some people having a lot more power than other people i don’t think the way to deal with any of that is to limit speech

 

PB: 40:04 you said something about how your liberal friends were angry with you about the role you played in citizens united on this issue of traditionally how people think of liberal and conservative, i hope i have listeners in both categories, but probably more in one category than the other 40r19 what does it mean to be liberal or conservative in the context of the first amendment? there’s some strange bedfellows that get made, right?

 

FA: Yes there are and one of the good favorable and optimistic things that i think that has been happening is that there has been more of a confluence of views in recent years than ever before. a conservative members of the supreme court have come a long way towards very fervent defense of the first amendment now in part that’s because 40:59 it’s their people and their causes which they think are being oppressed i mean when you look at protests at abortion centers right, we’ve had legislation designed to protect women in and out of abortion

 

PB: A certain zone of safety of some yards

 

FA: A zone of safety, the question is is there a zone of safety from speech? and that’s come up twice in the supreme court an the conservative members of the court adopted wholesale very broad views of the first amendment, which i fully agree with them on, justice scalia in particular, and justice kennedy, movingly 41:46 about and i have ever reason to believe they meant it, the need for very broad first amendment protections in these areas and one of the reasons why i do have some real hope in the first amendment area is that we’ve had a number of cases now in which awful speech, the westboro baptist church, that’s an eight to one opinion protecting speech which is not just ugly but painful and we’re the only country in the world that would protect that speech and i think that it speaks well for us and that it’s cheering 42:26  it gets protect and there are other cases, eight to one sometimes, nine to nothing protecting speech ehre that no other country would protect.

PB: Floyd Abrams, it is an honor to have you on the show thank you

 

FA: Thanks very much.