How does the First Amendment really work? Is it a principle or a value? What is hate speech and should it always be banned? Are we free to declare our religious beliefs in the public square? What role, if any, should companies like Facebook play in policing the exchange of thoughts, ideas, and opinions?
With clarity and power, Stanley Fish, “America’s most famous professor” (BookPage), explores these complex questions in The First. From the rise of fake news, to the role of tech companies in monitoring content (including the President’s tweets), to Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling protest, First Amendment controversies continue to dominate the news cycle. Across America, college campus administrators are being forced to balance free speech against demands for safe spaces and trigger warnings.
Ultimately, Fish argues, freedom of speech is a double-edged concept; it frees us from constraints, but it also frees us to say and do terrible things. Urgent and controversial, The First is sure to ruffle feathers, spark dialogue, and shine new light on one of America’s most cherished—and debated—constitutional rights.
Q. Why this book, and why now?
I wrote this book in response to what one might call the ACLU version of the First Amendment which in fact regards the First Amendment as the cornerstone of our democracy and regards any exceptions from the doctrine of freedom of speech to be suspicious. It seemed to me that exceptions to freedom of speech come first and freedom of speech comes second. In real life situations, what you can or cannot say is understood in advance; there are things you know that if said, they’ll work to your disadvantage in any number of ways. All human interactions are ruled by an in-advance stipulation of what things should and should not be said and for what reason, so that the condition of constraint (not being able to say anything you like freely) is the norm and some kind of free-speech zone is the artificial exception. I wanted to up-end the view of freedom of speech that most people are educated into; whereas freedom of speech is considered to be the default condition and acts of censorship or regulation are considered to be special and require justification. I say it’s the opposite. The first chapter of my book is entitled “Why censorship is a precondition of Freedom of Speech”.
The argument of the book would be relevant at any point because free speech rhetoric has a certain resonance in our deliberative lives as citizens of the United States. The inflated rhetoric of free speech is continually being retailed by our politicians, by educators, and by the ACLU, as I said before. I want to get people to think less formulaically and less patriotically about freedom of speech and introduce them into what really goes on when free speech issues are being debated.
Q. Who should read this book?
This is a book published by Simon & Schuster, which is a trade press, which tells you it’s not an academic book, although I hope that some academics would read it. The ideal reader for this book is someone that is interested in First Amendment issues, finds them arising everywhere and in almost every sector of society, and is willing to think through some of the assumptions and presuppositions that underlie the doctrine of freedom of speech. My ideal reader would not be an academic, although I welcome academic readers, but someone who is literate, curious, and interested in large philosophical questions, but not interested necessarily in having those questions answered in a dense philosophical treatise. So this book is full of examples, anecdotes, and references to contemporary disputes and it goes to introduce willing readers into the serious consideration of free speech questions.
Q. What is the most important takeaway you hope your readers gain from this book?
I hope that readers, especially in chapter 5, would wing themselves away from what I consider to be the most dangerous of free speech axioms–the more speech the better. This is something that a Fervent Apostle of the First Amendment often declare that more and more speech would lead to more and more openness, transparency, and clarity. My argument is that more and more speech would lead to more and more confusion and would provide the opportunity for trolls and predators to do their nefarious work. In chapter 5 especially, I am arguing that transparency is a bad idea and that no one really wants it and the celebration of it is in a way entirely mindless. For the same reason, the welcoming of more and more forms of speech into our culture is also, if not a bad idea, at least not an unalloyed good idea. And I want people to understand how the speech values which may have been in place in 1787 are perhaps not exactly pertinent to our situation today.
Q. How did you decide on the title and cover art?
I didn’t decide on the title, my editor at Simon & Schuster had decided on the title, I decided on the sub-title which is “How to think about hate speech, campus speech, religious speech, fake news, post-truth, and Donald Trump”. When I first handed in the sub-title it was longer because it also included post- modernism and transparency. That sub-title was meant to be a hook, a teaser, designed to make readers want to open the book and enter into discussion about on these issues.
As for the design and cover of the book, I had no role in that. I used to design my own books, this is by the way the nineteenth book I’ve written, and in the early days I used to design the book, the cover material, choose the boards, the font, and the page formats, but in the early 90’s I became the Director of the Duke University press and realized that people who work in the university press world, for good reasons, disliked the idea of authors coming in and telling them how to do their work. The moment I became a professional publisher, I ceased being someone who wanted to design his own books and saw myself in that instant as the pain-in-the-rear that I had always been.
Professor Fish comes to the College of Law from Chicago, where he most recently served as Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He holds a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania (1959) and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Yale University (1960; 1962). He has previously taught at the University of California at Berkeley (1962-74); Johns Hopkins University (1974-85), where he was the Kenan Professor of English and Humanities; and Duke University, where he was Arts and Sciences Professor of English and Professor of Law (1986-1998). From 1993 through 1998 he served as Executive Director of Duke University Press. Dr. Fish served as a Distinguished Visiting Professor at The John Marshall Law School from 2000 through 2002.