Justice & Law Quote by Floyd Abrams

A lawyer hears a story in verbs, and Abrams chooses the most loaded one: "exhausted". Not "appealed", not "pursued remedies", but a word that makes procedure sound like attrition. It frames CBS less as a litigant seeking clarity than as an institution willing to wear a state judiciary down until the system itself is the resource being consumed. In one stroke, he recasts what could be ordinary appellate escalation as a kind of legal endurance test.

The sentence’s rhythm does the rest. "They went from the trial court to the intermediate court to the highest court" is deliberately plain, almost childlike, the way you’d explain a ladder to someone seeing one for the first time. That simplicity is strategic: it invites the listener to feel the inevitability of the climb and, by extension, the imbalance of power behind it. A major network can keep climbing; most plaintiffs can’t.

Context matters because Abrams is not a random commentator; he’s a First Amendment heavyweight whose career has been built on defending the press in exactly these high-stakes, jurisdiction-hopping fights. When he narrates the route through Texas courts, he’s also hinting at forum politics: Texas as a tough venue, local juries, punitive damages, the latent threat of chilling investigative reporting. The subtext is a warning to anyone who covers powerful interests: even if you’re right, you can still be dragged the long way up the staircase until you’re too tired, too expensive, or too risk-averse to keep reporting.