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
loyalty causes clients
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.
new-york war block
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.
thinking people police
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.
years law lasts
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.
views freedom-of-speech important
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.
new-york today video
I can tell you, having been in court today in New York, that the requests for the video outtakes have been dropped.
believe weight matter
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.
country thinking would-be
I really do think that if we had lost that case we would really live in a country that would be really quite different.
real stories principles
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.
party government administration
The government understands - every government, every administration, both parties, understands - that that power, they just don't have.
certainly extended jail journalist longest protecting reason served service
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.