Quotes by Floyd Abrams

It just seems to be a human trait to want to protect the speech of people with whom we agree. For the First Amendment, that is not good enough. So it is really important that we protect First Amendment rights of people no matter what side of the line they are on.

— Floyd Abrams

Life

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.

— Floyd Abrams

Freedom

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.

— Floyd Abrams

Wisdom

I am really impressed by lawyers who write books and tell us that they never lost a case. Most lawyers who have never lost a case have not had enough hard cases. But there are very difficult cases out there.

— Floyd Abrams

Wisdom

I try to do that in this book without preaching - to try to do as you just said that you really have to defend the First Amendment rights of everybody.

— Floyd Abrams

Wisdom

I just had the sense that at least the books that I had read about law just didn't really have enough of that.

— Floyd Abrams

Wisdom

Here we have a situation where a defendant in a case agrees to an interview with Dan Rather. It happened to be not confidential. But it was an interview with Dan Rather.

— Floyd Abrams

Wisdom

I mean the idea of this is that it's a good thing for the public to hear interviews like this and that there will be an inevitable amount of fewer interviews if people that the press talks to wind up thinking, well, it's not really a CBS correspondent.

— Floyd Abrams

Wisdom

I really try at least to come back and answer the question as to whether that was really the best way to do that and was I really thinking straight and how did my opponents behave and how did the judges behave was needed.

— Floyd Abrams

Wisdom

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.

— Floyd Abrams

Education

It has something to do with the facts and the law and who the judges are. So I think lawyers sometimes exaggerate their role in winning and losing. Lawyers do have a role, and a major role, but they're not the only players in this game.

— Floyd Abrams

Wisdom

There are some circumstances in which the First Amendment interest comes up against another interest that is really important and in which we have to make a decision in a particular case as to which is more important.

— Floyd Abrams

Wisdom

Were this not Texas, were there not a state where there were no protections at all and where the law was clear on that, I think CBS and Mary Mapes and Dan Rather and all of us had a very good chance of winning. So this is an ongoing battle about an issue of principle.

— Floyd Abrams

Wisdom

It's not like learning how to hit a curve ball in baseball.

— Floyd Abrams

Education

CBS fought very hard on this because it believed and believes that there's a principle at stake here. The principle is that Dan Rather doesn't work for the police, and that people that speak to Dan Rather understand that he's a journalist and not a police agent.

— Floyd Abrams

Success

I think that it is important for people to understand that whether a good-guy or a bad-guy wins a case is less important than what the law is that the case results in.

— Floyd Abrams

Wisdom

The question at the end of the day was, the courts having found there was no defense, a producer about to go to jail, should CBS in effect tell the producer go to jail even though there is no law at all that we can use to get you out of jail?

— Floyd Abrams

Wisdom

CBS exhausted the Texas courts. They went from the trial court to the intermediate court to the highest court.

— Floyd Abrams

Wisdom

I think that the very fact that CBS fought and fought and fought in Texas, in New York.

— Floyd Abrams

Wisdom

The principle though remains the same, and the important thing is CBS fought hard, very hard, to protect that principle and will fight again.

— Floyd Abrams

Wisdom

This is going right to the police. So, it's a very dangerous precedent.

— Floyd Abrams

Wisdom

I know a lot of reporters certainly will go to jail to defend confidential sources. Some have even gone to jail for an issue like this. But I can't say that's the norm.

— Floyd Abrams

Wisdom

I really did try to write it so that an educated public that cares about issues like this doesn't have to be a lawyer and can read it and understand it.

— Floyd Abrams

Wisdom

I think we have some serious problems now, but, if you look back over the last thirty or forty years that my book deals with, I think we are in better shape now than we would have been if all of those cases had not come down.

— Floyd Abrams

Wisdom