Education Quote by Floyd Abrams

A top First Amendment lawyer confessing he wrote for non-lawyers is less humility than a quiet rebuke: the law has made itself unreadable on purpose. Abrams is describing an intent that sounds almost radical in his profession - to treat the public as the real audience, not just judges, clerks, and opposing counsel. The line is crafted to flatter ("educated public") while drawing a boundary: this isn’t aimed at everyone, but at citizens who take civic disputes seriously and shouldn’t need a decoder ring to participate.

The subtext is reputational and strategic. Abrams has spent a career arguing that speech disputes are ultimately about democratic legitimacy, not merely technical doctrine. So clarity becomes a form of advocacy: if the lay reader can follow the reasoning, the argument gains moral force, not just legal plausibility. He’s also implicitly acknowledging how legal writing often functions as gatekeeping - obscurity as insulation, jargon as authority. By saying he "really did try", Abrams hints at resistance: institutional habits, professional incentives, maybe even colleagues who confuse complexity with rigor.

Context matters because Abrams occupies a rare perch: he litigated for newspapers, universities, and high-profile speakers, where public opinion shadows every courtroom move. In that world, persuading the broader culture is part of the job. The sentence reads like a small democratic promise: that constitutional arguments should be legible to the people whose rights are being negotiated, not only to the specialists paid to translate them.