Success Quote by Floyd Abrams

Abrams is doing a lawyerly tightrope walk: praising America’s First Amendment exceptionalism while refusing to let it harden into absolutist mythology. The opening move, “No other country,” is both pride and warning. It frames U.S. speech law as a global outlier, a system designed to make it difficult - sometimes maddeningly difficult - to punish speech, especially when the target is powerful or the subject is public. But he immediately punctures the chest-thump: “it is not absolute protection.” That second clause isn’t rhetorical modesty; it’s boundary-setting.

The key phrase is “that high burden.” Abrams is gesturing at the architecture built by cases like New York Times v. Sullivan: plaintiffs, particularly public officials and public figures, must clear a steep evidentiary wall (actual malice, real damage, rigorous proof). In political terms, he’s defending a rule that tolerates error, even ugliness, because the alternative invites a richer person’s veto over public debate.

Then comes the subtextual flex: “People sometimes meet that high burden and win libel suits.” In an era when free-speech talk often collapses into two camps - censorious scolds vs. absolutist trolls - Abrams insists on a third lane: accountability is legitimate when it’s earned. “And in those cases I think they ought to win” reads like a corrective aimed at both sides: to critics, it says the system isn’t rigged against reputation; to speech maximalists, it says the First Amendment isn’t a hall pass for calculated lies.

Contextually, this is Abrams the storied First Amendment litigator defending a pragmatic ideal: maximal breathing room for debate, with a narrow, demanding escape hatch for genuine, provable harm.