The government understands - every government, every administration, both parties, understands - that that power, they just don't have.

It just seems to be a human trait to want to protect the speech of people with whom we agree. For the First Amendment, that is not good enough. So it is really important that we protect First Amendment rights of people no matter what side of the line they are on.

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.

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.

I really believe that a lawyer - no matter how good - if he or she is really worth their weight in salt, they will lose some cases because, after all, it is not really one of those secretive things that not everything is decided by who your lawyer is.

I just had the sense that at least the books that I had read about law just didn't really have enough of that.

I thought that one of the things that we were losing sight of is the basic reasons that we do protect free speech and freedom of the press and the essentiality and centrality in our lives of really giving broad protection to freedom of speech and freedom of the press in America. I thought I could do that by telling stories of some of the cases that established those principles on a real life on the ground basis.