Justice & Law Quote by Floyd Abrams

Abrams is diagnosing a comforting hypocrisy: we lionize free speech until the speaker stops sounding like us. The first line isn’t abstract principle; it’s courtroom realism. Most people don’t oppose the First Amendment in theory. They just quietly rebrand it as a loyalty program, redeemable only for the views they already find tolerable. By naming that “human trait,” Abrams frames selective tolerance as instinctive, almost banal, which makes it harder to dress up as moral sophistication.

The pivot - “For the First Amendment, that is not good enough” - does the real work. It treats the Constitution as an adversarial machine, not a mood. Rights aren’t validated by popularity; they’re stress-tested by revulsion. Abrams’s intent is to move the listener from sentiment to discipline: if your commitment collapses at the first ugly poster or obnoxious rally, it was never a commitment, just aesthetics.

The subtext carries a lawyer’s warning: once you build exceptions for the people you dislike, you hand the state a reusable weapon. Today’s “obvious” bad actor becomes tomorrow’s convenient precedent. That’s why his language stays procedural (“protect,” “rights,” “no matter what side of the line”) rather than romantic. He’s not selling speech as sacred; he’s selling it as a system that only functions when applied evenly.

Context matters: Abrams spent decades defending major press outlets and controversial speakers, often in moments when public pressure demanded punishment disguised as principle. This is the ethos of civil libertarian lawyering distilled: neutrality isn’t niceness; it’s damage control for democracy.