Justice & Law Quote by Floyd Abrams

The line lands with the clipped urgency of someone who knows institutions intimately and still doesn’t fully trust them. “This is going right to the police” isn’t just a procedural note; it’s a power move. Floyd Abrams, a First Amendment lawyer whose career is built on navigating the space between speech and state force, invokes the police as both shield and escalation. It signals: we’re past internal fixes, past reputational hand-wringing, past the quiet settlement. The dispute is being reframed as public harm, not private conflict.

Then comes the real payload: “a very dangerous precedent.” Abrams is speaking the dialect of the legal class, where “precedent” is the word that turns one messy episode into a lasting rule. The subtext is anxiety about normalization. Whatever “this” is - a leak, a threat, a protest tactic, a pressure campaign - the fear is less the immediate incident than the permission structure it could create. Precedent is how exceptional responses become routine.

The phrasing is doing two jobs at once. It warns the audience (often media, institutions, or policymakers) that overreacting can harden into doctrine, while also justifying a strong response by implying the stakes are systemic. “Very dangerous” is a deliberate amplifier, meant to travel well in headlines and to prime listeners to think beyond guilt or innocence to downstream effects.

Coming from Abrams, the context matters: he’s historically defended expansive speech rights, but he’s also pragmatic about the real-world consequences of intimidation and coercion. The tension in the quote is the point: calling the police can be necessary, and still be the kind of step that, once taken and repeated, quietly redraws the boundaries of what society treats as acceptable dissent.