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More than any other people on earth, Americans are free to say and write what they think. The media can air the secrets of the White House, the boardroom, or the bedroom with little fear of punishment or penalty. The reason for this extraordinary freedom is not a superior culture of tolerance, but just fourteen words in our most fundamental legal document: the free expression clauses of the First Amendment to the Constitution. In Lewis's telling, the story of how the right of free expression evolved along with our nation makes a compelling case for the adaptability of our constitution. Although Americans have gleefully and sometimes outrageously exercised their right to free speech since before the nation's founding, the Supreme Court did not begin to recognize this right until 1919. Freedom of speech and the press as we know it today is surprisingly recent. Anthony Lewis tells us how these rights were created, revealing a story of hard choices, heroic (and some less heroic) judges, and fascinating and eccentric defendants who forced the legal system to come face-to-face with one of America's great founding ideas.

Tabla de contenidos provista por Syndetics

• Introduction(p. ix)
• 1 Beginnings(p. 1)
• 2 Odious or Contemptible(p. 11)
• 3 As All Life Is an Experiment(p. 23)
• 4 Defining Freedom(p. 39)
• 5 Freedom and Privacy(p. 59)
• 6 A Press Privilege?(p. 81)
• 7 Fear Itself(p. 101)
• 8 Another's Lyric(p. 131)
• 9 Vagabonds and Outlaws(p. 143)
• 10 Thoughts That We Hate(p. 157)
• 11 Balancing Interests(p. 169)
• 12 Freedom of Thought(p. 183)
• Acknowledgments(p. 191)
• Table of Cases(p. 193)
• Notes(p. 197)
• Index(p. 209)

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Publishers Weekly Review

The First Amendment's injunction that "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press" seems cut and dried, but its application has had a vexed history, according to this lucid legal history, Lewis's first book in 15 years (after Make No Law and Gideon's Trumpet). Some suppressions of free speech passed constitutional muster in their day: the 1798 Sedition Act criminalized criticism of the president, and the WWI-era Sedition Act sentenced a minister to 15 years in prison for telling his Bible class that "a Christian can take no part in the war." Law professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning ex-New York Times columnist Lewis explores other First Amendment legal quagmires, including libel law, privacy issues, the press's shielding of confidential sources, obscenity and hate speech. Not quite a free speech absolutist, he's for punishing "speech that urges terrorist violence to an audience... whose members are ready to act." Lewis's story is about the advancement of freedom by the likes of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Louis Brandeis and others whose "bold judicial decisions have made the country what it is." The result is an occasionally stirring account of America's evolving idea of liberty. (Jan. 14) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Booklist Review

Freedom of expression is a freedom that Americans take for granted and occasionally abuse. Lewis, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gideon's Trumpet (1964) and New York Times columnist, offers a thoughtful essay on the evolution of the American concept of free speech from the First Amendment through modern challenges to free speech. He notes the dubious beginnings of charges of seditious libel for those who challenged the authority of church or state in England and colonial America and the arduous path to the Constitution and the First Amendment. But the First Amendment was just the beginning of codification of free speech as a long history of challenges, brave defendants, and heroic and not so heroic judges fought over the meaning of freedom of expression. Lewis reviews famous cases, including challenges by Socialist Eugene V. Debs and others espousing political views not in the mainstream, the 1964 libel case of the New York Times v. Sullivan arising out of the civil rights movement, and a host of challenges to the free speech of Nazis and others whose opinions are not always welcome.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2007 Booklist

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Anthony Lewis is the author of Make No Law and the bestseller Gideon's Trumpet. In his nearly five decades of writing and reporting for The New York Times, he served as the Time's London bureau chief for eight years; he now contributes the twice-weekly "Abroad at Home" column to the paper's op-ed page.

(Bowker Author Biography)