Justice & Law Quote by Floyd Abrams

A good First Amendment lawyer knows the easiest way to lose the argument is to sound like you’re delivering a sermon. Abrams is signaling craft as much as conviction: he wants a book that persuades by example, not by scolding. “Without preaching” isn’t modesty; it’s strategy. In a culture where “free speech” is routinely treated as a team jersey, moralizing invites readers to sort themselves into camps before they’ve absorbed the principle.

The key move is “everybody.” Abrams is not defending speech he likes. He’s defending the architecture that protects speech he may despise. That word carries the subtext of the real First Amendment test: the hard cases, the ugly speakers, the statements that make your stomach turn. In practice, a commitment to free expression is measured less by your tolerance for agreeable dissent than by your willingness to extend rights to the people you’re tempted to call exceptions.

Context matters here. Abrams is a central figure in modern American press and speech law, a defender of institutions (newsrooms, publishers, courts) that depend on rules holding even when public sympathy doesn’t. His tone is lawyerly but calibrated for a general audience: he frames the First Amendment not as an abstract fetish, but as a discipline. “You really have to defend” reads like a corrective to the current moment’s selective outrage, where many want maximal speech for their side and moderation for the other.

The intent, then, is to re-sell an old, demanding bargain: if rights are conditional, they’re not rights; they’re permissions, revocable the moment the audience changes.