Finding, Framing, and Hanging Jefferson: A Lost Letter, a Remarkable Discovery, and Freedom of Speech in an Age of Terrorism: A lost letter. A ... the First Amendment in an Age of Terrorism - Hardcover

Dershowitz, Alan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0470167114 ISBN 13: 9780470167113

Verlag: WILEY, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

The distinguished Harvard Law School professor and passionate collector describes how he stumbled upon a forgotten letter by Thomas Jefferson in which America's third president shares his reflections on the freedom of speech, views that have a particular significance in an age of terrorism.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Harold Ramis, film director,screenwriter, and actor

ALAN DERSHOWITZ, the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, is one of the country's foremost appellate lawyers and a distinguished defender of individual liberties. His many books include the #1 New York Times bestseller Chutzpah, Preemption: A Knife That Cuts Both Ways, and the Wiley books The Case for Israel, also a New York Times bestseller; The Case for Peace: How the Arab-Israeli Conflict Can Be Resolved; What Israel Means to Me; and Blasphemy. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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Freedom of speech, the right to voice one's opinions without fear of government reprisal, is one of America's most dearly held principles?championed by the founding fathers, enshrined in the Bill of Rights, and exercised with passion and frequency by Americans of every persuasion. What happens, however, when a speaker publicly exhorts others to violent acts that threaten to cause injury or death? Can a line be drawn between speech that incites violence and that which does not, or is all speech protected under that Bill of Rights? Even Thomas Jefferson himself was silent on the subject?until now.

In Finding Jefferson, #1 New York Times?bestselling author Alan Dershowitz tells a remark-able story about how his passion for collecting led him to a discovery of tremendous historical and present-day importance. On September 8, 2006, in a dusty old Manhattan bookstore, he found an 1801 letter written by his hero Thomas Jefferson that speaks directly to the issue of intentionally harmful or dangerous speech.

Dershowitz, writing with the ardor of a collector, the energy of an advocate, and the rigor of a scholar, verifies the letter's authenticity, explains its importance within the context of Jefferson's writing, and, in true Dershowitzian style, takes his hero to task, point by opinionated point.

Finally, Dershowitz applies his extensive knowledge of Jefferson to the question of whether to restrict free speech in an age of terrorism and suicide bombings, when deterrence is rarely an option. Quoting freely from Jefferson's many writings on law, rights, and national survival, and citing his actions during the Aaron Burr treason trial, Dershowitz presents a compelling case that, today, Jefferson would probably opt for some narrow restrictions against speech intended to incite violence but would insist on protecting all other types of speech.

Engaging and passionately written, Finding Jefferson is compelling reading for anyone interested in free speech, American history, and the conflict between individual rights and national security in the face of terrorism.

"Alan Dershowitz lives and breathes history. The book is both a warm personal insight into Dershowitz, the grown-up whiz kid still fuming because his mother threw out his comic books and baseball cards, and a great lesson on democracy from one of its wisest and most articulate advocates."

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Freedom of speech, the right to voice one's opinions without fear of government reprisal, is one of America's most dearly held principles--championed by the founding fathers, enshrined in the Bill of Rights, and exercised with passion and frequency by Americans of every persuasion. What happens, however, when a speaker publicly exhorts others to violent acts that threaten to cause injury or death? Can a line be drawn between speech that incites violence and that which does not, or is all speech protected under that Bill of Rights? Even Thomas Jefferson himself was silent on the subject--until now.

In Finding Jefferson, #1 New York Times-bestselling author Alan Dershowitz tells a remark-able story about how his passion for collecting led him to a discovery of tremendous historical and present-day importance. On September 8, 2006, in a dusty old Manhattan bookstore, he found an 1801 letter written by his hero Thomas Jefferson that speaks directly to the issue of intentionally harmful or dangerous speech.

Dershowitz, writing with the ardor of a collector, the energy of an advocate, and the rigor of a scholar, verifies the letter's authenticity, explains its importance within the context of Jefferson's writing, and, in true Dershowitzian style, takes his hero to task, point by opinionated point.

Finally, Dershowitz applies his extensive knowledge of Jefferson to the question of whether to restrict free speech in an age of terrorism and suicide bombings, when deterrence is rarely an option. Quoting freely from Jefferson's many writings on law, rights, and national survival, and citing his actions during the Aaron Burr treason trial, Dershowitz presents a compelling case that, today, Jefferson would probably opt for some narrow restrictions against speech intended to incite violence but would insist on protecting all other types of speech.

Engaging and passionately written, Finding Jefferson is compelling reading for anyone interested in free speech, American history, and the conflict between individual rights and national security in the face of terrorism.

"Alan Dershowitz lives and breathes history. The book is both a warm personal insight into Dershowitz, the grown-up whiz kid still fuming because his mother threw out his comic books and baseball cards, and a great lesson on democracy from one of its wisest and most articulate advocates."

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Finding, Framing, and Hanging Jefferson

A Lost Letter, a Remarkable Discovery, and the First Amendment in an Age of TerrorismBy Alan Dershowitz

John Wiley & Sons

Copyright © 2007 Alan Dershowitz
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-470-16711-3

Chapter One

My Passion for Collecting

I'm a collector. I've always been a collector. As a kid I collected Brooklyn Dodger autographs, baseball cards, comic books, stamps, coins, bottle tops, and anything else that could fit into one drawer in the bureau I shared with my younger brother (and even some things that couldn't, like tropical fish). I never threw anything away (except the dead fish), much to my mother's chagrin.

"What are you gonna do with all that junk?" she asked imploringly.

"It's gonna be valuable someday," I responded, pointing with pride to my neatly organized treasures.

And they would have been valuable someday-at least, the comic books and the baseball cards-had my mother not thrown them out the minute I left home for law school (I lived at home while attending Brooklyn College). I once found a T-shirt that well summarized my plight (and that of an entire generation of young collectors). It said, "Once I was a millionaire ... then my mother threw my baseball cards away."

My mother, who was a frugal survivor of the Great Depression, didn't throw away my stamps or coins. Those she gave to my brother and younger cousins, who kept them until they left home, when these collections were promptly recycled to yet younger relatives. Because I was the oldest among my more than thirty first cousins, the recycling went only one way, with me being the involuntary recycler and never the recyclee of any good stuff. Where my treasures are now, no one knows, and I suspect that the statute of limitations has long since passed on any repleven action (a lawsuit for return of property) I might have had against cousin Norman. The comic books, the baseball cards, and the autographs my mother simply threw into the garbage, because-unlike the stamps and the coins, which were currency-they had no intrinsic value. The remainder of my tchotchkes (Yiddish for inexpensive collectibles) went to some deserving neighborhood kid or to tchotchke heaven. All I know is I never saw them again.

Nor did I really care. After all, I was going to law school-Yale, to boot. (My mother never forgave me for turning down Harvard. For years she told people, "He got into Harvard, but he went to Yale.") I was on to bigger and better things. The Dodgers had abandoned Brooklyn for Los Angeles, and I had abandoned baseball (at least until I moved to Boston and joined "Red Sox Nation"). Who needed comic books when I could read Blackstone's Commentaries on the Law?

My penchant for collecting didn't abandon me, however. It just went in a different direction. I'd managed to find three volumes of an early American edition of Blackstone. (I'm still looking for the fourth to complete my set-the 1791 edition. If anyone has it for sale, please be in touch.) I started to collect autographs of Supreme Court Justices, Vanity Fair prints, and old books. I have found first editions of books by Lewis Carroll, Theodore Herzl, Anne Frank, and others. When I became a full professor at Harvard in 1967 (that's when my mother finally stopped complaining that I had chosen Yale), Professor Henry Hart gave me an original copy of the complete transcript of the Sacco-Vanzetti trial that had been owned by Felix Frankfurter-who had been one of the lawyers in the case-and had been given to him by Frankfurter when Hart became a professor. These volumes are part of a large collection of historic trial transcripts, many from England, that I have accumulated over the years.

I also collected old newspapers with contemporaneous accounts of significant historical events, such as the assassination of Lincoln, the death of Hitler, the establishment of Israel, and the duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. It was fascinating to read how these events were reported at the time. It helped me to better understand why journalism is called "the first draft of history." When Harvard Law School put its vast newspaper collection on microfilm, I bought several volumes of old editions of the New York Times. The ads are an especially interesting window to the past.

I did not have much money when I was young, so I was always searching for bargains. I went to the used book stores that lined Fourth Avenue in Manhattan and to flea markets, garage sales, library de-acquisitions, and junk shops. This was before eBay, Antiques Roadshow, and magazines dedicated to the art of collecting. To me, collecting was not an art; it was an addiction.

"What are you looking for?" my friends asked. "What do you expect to find-the original Declaration of Independence?"

"No," I assured them, knowingly. "The original is in the Archives. But an early copy?"

There is an urban myth-maybe even a true story, who knows?-of someone who found an early copy of the Declaration in an old frame behind a print of dogs playing poker that he had bought for five bucks at a flea market. He sold it for a fortune. I have never sold anything. For me, collecting is a one-way street. I collect. I don't distribute. I also look behind every print I buy. So far, no luck. The best I've come up with are some interesting old newspapers-one that announced Hitler's death. But I did manage to find a beautiful nineteenth-century facsimile of the Declaration that hangs behind my desk in my home office.

My wife, Carolyn, who is the opposite of a collector, is known in the family as "Swoop," because she throws away anything that's not bolted to the ground. Opposites do attract. Carolyn tolerates my passion for collecting as long as I keep my stuff in my home office, which is overflowing with tchotchkes, books, old newspapers, art, and antiques. She is thinking about imposing a new rule: for every new purchase, I have to get rid of something of equal size. I can't. I won't! Off-site storage seems like a reasonable compromise.

My wife and I do share a passion for collecting real antiques and art. In general, we have to agree on an object before we buy it, but we each have the right to buy art for our own home offices, based on our individual tastes. Several years ago, my wife and I were in Los Angeles visiting my son, Elon, who is a film producer. As usual, I was looking for antiques and my wife was exploring one of her many passions-shoes. I walked down Melrose Avenue and saw a store with old amusement park gizmos on the sidewalk. (We have an old Coney Island bumper car in our living room.) When I went in, my eyes were drawn immediately to the rear third of an old Cadillac from the late fifties-you know, the ones with the enormous fins and shiny chrome. Some enterprising artist had turned it into a couch, with the trunk as the seating area. It was beautiful.

It was also nostalgic, reminding me of my teenage years, when I and several friends chipped in to buy an old Caddy that barely worked. It went a mile on two gallons. Our interest was not in a driving machine, however, but in a place to make out with our girlfriends. We were more interested in the backseat than in the front. We made up for the cost of the car by renting out the backseat to friends. (Fortunately, nobody ever got beyond second base, so we could not be charged with operating a house-or a car-of ill repute.)

The Cadillac for sale on Melrose Avenue was a lot nicer and shinier than our beat-up old one, but it still evoked fond...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: WILEY
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2007
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0470167114
• ISBN 13: 9780470167113
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 244
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland