Legal News

Remembering Jack Landau, ?First Amendment Guerrilla?

By Dan Slater

Lawyer, E. Barrett Prettyman left, with Jack Landau, director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, after Prettyman argued that judges were subjecting the press to unconstitutional gag orders, April 19, 1976. (AP Photo/Harvey Georges)

Jack Landau, a journalist, a lawyer and a leader of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, died last week. He was 74. A newsletter that Landau created is now the quarterly magazine The News Media & the Law.

According to his NYT obit, Landau (Harvard, NYU Law) called himself a “First Amendment guerrilla” and said the RCFP was designed to operate like the reporters it represented. “Basically, the idea was to fight back, and if you couldn’t do it nicely, you did it through warfare,” said Landau.

After law school, Landau worked for the Bergen Evening Record, the AP and the WaPo before becoming press secretary to Attorney General John Mitchell during the Nixon administration and then the principal leader of the RCFP.

But Landau had his detractors. In 1979, Michael Kinsley, then the managing editor of The New Republic, said, “Despite what you read in the papers, the biggest threat to the First Amendment roaming loose in Washington these days is not Justice Byron White of the United States Supreme Court. It is Jack Landau, the monomaniacal head of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on August 20, 2008 (boomark / email).