230 years after its ratification, the First Amendment is having a nervous breakdown. Billions of bits of information and misinformation flood the public sphere every day leading people to throw up their hands because they can’t figure out what or whom to believe. Bedrock principles of Enlightenment philosophers and great First Amendment champions, Justices Oliver
Remembering a great journalist, investigator, teacher, mentor and friend When I woke up the day after William A. Recktenwald died this week, the first thing I heard in my head was his gravelly voice asking, “How are you doing my friend?” It was a greeting I had heard from “Reck” dozens of times over the
As a rookie reporter at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch five decades ago, I sat directly in front of Ted Link, a Post-Dispatch legend. Link never said a word to me. I never said a word to Link. But I looked up to him as one of those crusty veterans who had made the Post-Dispatch great.
The Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol raised a host of questions about free expression where the law of the First Amendment is widely misunderstood. Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, who went to Stanford, graduated from Yale Law School and clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts, claimed Simon & Schuster assaulted the First Amendment by
The 2020 election and Trump presidency are stress tests for American democracy and its first principles of freedom, equality and democratic elections. In our democracy, an enlightened citizenry, informed by a free press, renders its judgment and a losing incumbent peacefully transfers power to a new president. The transfer of power has happened so many
