Quotes from Floyd Abrams

The government would be able to go to court with respect to newspaper articles, broadcast pieces and the like that they thought were bad or harmful or even against the government and try to block them.

I really did try to write it so that an educated public that cares about issues like this doesn't have to be a lawyer and can read it and understand it.

CBS exhausted the Texas courts. They went from the trial court to the intermediate court to the highest court.

My role in it was not as central as it was in some of the later cases considering I was younger then and I was playing a role of co-counsel on the case.

It is within the last quarter century or thirty years. And a lot of that law has turned out to be very, very protective of the press and the public's right to know.

So sometimes the facts are good and sometimes the facts are bad, the important thing from the point of view of a principle as broad and important as freedom of speech is that the courts articulate and set forth in a very protective way what those principles are.

CBS fought very hard on this because it believed and believes that there's a principle at stake here. The principle is that Dan Rather doesn't work for the police, and that people that speak to Dan Rather understand that he's a journalist and not a police agent.

I really try at least to come back and answer the question as to whether that was really the best way to do that and was I really thinking straight and how did my opponents behave and how did the judges behave was needed.