Supreme Semester Continues with Discussion on First Amendment with Pulitzer-Prize Winning Author

The RWU community was treated to another installment of the “Supreme Semester” when one of the top Court watchers, Anthony Lewis, spoke at the School of Law recently.  Lewis, who has won not one but two Pulitzer Prizes for his journalism, is perhaps best known for his classic book Gideon’s Trumpet, a dramatic recounting of the seminal case of Gideon v. Wainright, in which the Supreme Court recognized that criminal defendants had a constitutional right to counsel.

Lewis’ presentation focused on the key cases and justices that have given us a robust set of protections for speech and press, wonderfully detailed in his new book Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment.  (The title comes from a famous dissenting opinion penned by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. almost 80 years ago.) Lewis provided some terrific recollections, including his encounter with Justice Felix Frankfurter, who expressed frustration that he had seen his credentials as a “liberal” had vanished as the Court moved from deference to reformist social legislation (a change in which he was an intellectual leader for deference to the democratic branches) to a willingness to strike down government efforts to restrict civil liberties (overriding the judgments of the democratically-elected branches, which he was disinclined to do).

Lewis also expressed unease with the proliferation of “insider accounts” of the work of the Supreme Court, beginning with the The Brethren, and most recently The Nine, for two reasons.  One: they often contain misinformation.  Second, even when they are accurate, he doubted that much of value was added beyond the written opinions in which the justices justify decisons.  On the other hand, Lewis believed that coverage of the United States Supreme Court has improved over the decades, and he singled out for commendation the work of Linda Greenhouse from the New York Times (who is the RWU Law Commencement Speaker this May) and Joan Biskupic from USA Today.

For more information about this visit click here for a link to a New York Times review of Freedom for the Thought We Hate and click here for a link to a New York Times interview with Anthony Lewis.

Here are pictures from this event: