From Amy Gajda’s ‘Seek and Hide’: The Enduring Battle to Keep Private Lives Private

An excerpt from Amy Gajda's 'Seek and Hide: The Tangled History of the Right to Privacy,' one of The New York Times' top 100 notable books of 2022.

Authors Share Excerpts on Free Speech: Robert Corn-Revere and the Censor’s Dilemma

In his new book, "The Mind of the Censor and the Eye of the Beholder," Robert Corn-Revere asks a simple question: what characterizes the psychology of a censor? For Corn-Revere, the attitudes of moral crusaders have been fairly consistent over the last 200 years: they are marked at once by a rigid certainty that the ideas they target are indisputably harmful and an insecure defensiveness stemming from the awareness that most people will reject their attempts at censorship.

Akhil Reed Amar: “The Words that Made Us: America’s Constitutional Conversation, 1760-1840”

In his newest book, The Words that Made Us: America’s Constitutional Conversation 1760-1840, Yale law professor and constitutional historian Akhil Reed Amar tells the story of the first 80 years of democratic debate in the United States. This excerpt focuses on the origins of America’s newspaper culture and the central role it played in forming our democracy.

Authors Share Excerpts on Free Speech: Ian Rosenberg and The Marketplace of Ideas

In "The Fight for Free Speech," Ian Rosenberg distills the last century of First Amendment law into ten critical issues. The first chapter, excerpted here, traces the story of several anarchists who were tried under the Espionage Act of 1917 for distributing anti-war pamphlets.

Authors Share Excerpts on Free Speech: Timothy Zick on The First Amendment in the Trump Era

In The First Amendment in the Trump Era, Timothy Zick catalogs and analyzes the various First Amendment conflicts that have occurred during the Trump presidency. It places these conflicts in historical context–as part of our current digitized and polarized era but also as part of a broader narrative concerning attacks on free speech and press. We must understand what is familiar in terms of the First Amendment concerns of the present era, but also what is distinctive about these concerns.

Authors Share Excerpts on Free Speech: Amy Werbel and Lust on Trial

In Lust on Trial, [Amy] Werbel presents a colorful journey through Comstock’s career that doubles as a new history of post–Civil War America’s risqué visual and sexual culture. Born into a puritanical New England community, Anthony Comstock moved to New York in 1868 armed with his Christian faith and a burning desire to rid the city of vice.

Authors Share Excerpts on Free Speech: Floyd Abrams and The Soul of the First Amendment

The Soul of the First Amendment "addresses legal issues from the adoption of the Bill of Rights through recent cases such as Citizens United" and  "examines the repeated conflicts between claims of free speech and those of national security occasioned by the publication of classified material such as was contained in the Pentagon Papers and was made public by WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden" - Yale University Press..

Authors Share Excerpts on Free Speech: Marjorie Heins on Some of its Ironies and Complications

Ironies and Complications of Free Speech, a collection of the best writing from the Free Expression Policy Project (2001-2017), covers topics that range from loyalty oaths, junk science to the FCC’s censorship of “indecency” on the airwaves, Janet Jackson’s infamous “wardrobe malfunction” at the 2004 Super Bowl, and other controversies.