Miscellaneous

Blawg Book Highlighter #24: Freedom for the Thought We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment

By Bill Gratsch

Blawg Book Highlighter #24: Freedom for the Thought We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment

I've lamented before the failure of most law schools to expose students to non-judicial writings, citing Scott Turow's "10 Books to Read on the Law" as examples of books that should be required reading in law schools.

I'd add to Turow's superb list Anthony Lewis' classic, Gideon's Trumpet, about defendants' rights to a lawyer, which I was required to read in journalism school. It wasn't required reading in law school, but should have been. I learned more from it than I did from reading the case on which it was based, Gideon v. Wainwright, which, of course, was required reading in Constitutional Law.

Lewis, who has twice won the Pulitzer Prize, wrote Gideon's Trumpet in 1964. His first book in over 15 years is Freedom for the Thought We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment, which, according to the book description, is "the story of how the right of free expression evolved along with out nation."

Fourteen words.  Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press. . . ." To Lewis, those 14 words in the U.S. Constitution and the debate over what they mean provide the real meaning of our democracy.

"Although Americans have gleefully and sometimes outrageously exercised their right to free speech since before the nation's founding," the book description states, "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."  In the book, 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.
Critics seem to think the long wait between books has been worth it.

Jonathan Kirsch of the Los Angeles Times finds Lewis's short history of the 1st Amendment to be "always illuminating and sometimes rollicking" and notes that he "makes a stirring argument for what conservatives dismiss as 'judicial activism.'"

Writing for The Boston Globe, Rick Barlow declares that Freedom for the Thought That We Hate is a "dandy primer" on the value of our freedom of expression.

And Jeffrey Rosen of the New York Times states that Lewis "has been one of the most inspiring advocates of a heroic view of the American judiciary" and that his latest contribution "is a passionate if discursive essay."

************************************************************************************

Randy Richardson is an author, humorist, former journalist, and a lawyer. His fiction debut, Lost in the Ivy, a murder mystery set against the backdrop of Chicago's storied Wrigley Field, won the Writers Marketing Association's ?Fresh Voices? Book Award and the Illinois Woman's Press Association's Mate E. Palmer Communications Contest. He writes the Dad Libs column for SanityCentral.com and is a frequent contributor to Chicago Parent magazine. In his day job, he is an attorney for the Social Security Administration?s disability appeals branch. At night and during lunch breaks, he serves as president of the Chicago Writers Association (chicagowrites.org) and works on his second novel while a 4-year-old tugs on his legs. Visit his website at www.lostintheivy.com.

***********************************************************************************

Full post as published by Blawgs Blog by Bill Gratsch on March 08, 2008 (boomark / email).