Floyd Abrams quotes
CBS exhausted the Texas courts. They went from the trial court to the intermediate court to the highest court.
CBS fought very hard on this because it believed and believes that there's a principle at stake here. The principle is that Dan Rather doesn't work for the police, and that people that speak to Dan Rather understand that he's a journalist and not a police agent.
Here we have a situation where a defendant in a case agrees to an interview with Dan Rather. It happened to be not confidential. But it was an interview with Dan Rather.
I am really impressed by lawyers who write books and tell us that they never lost a case. Most lawyers who have never lost a case have not had enough hard cases. But there are very difficult cases out there.
I can tell you, having been in court today in New York, that the requests for the video outtakes have been dropped.
I decided that these are not secrets in the sense that once you know what the strategy was you'll be able next time to feed it.
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 know a lot of reporters certainly will go to jail to defend confidential sources. Some have even gone to jail for an issue like this. But I can't say that's the norm.
I mean the idea of this is that it's a good thing for the public to hear interviews like this and that there will be an inevitable amount of fewer interviews if people that the press talks to wind up thinking, well, it's not really a CBS correspondent.
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 really did try to write it so that an educated public that cares about issues like this doesn't have to be a lawyer and can read it and understand it.
I really do think that if we had lost that case we would really live in a country that would be really quite different.
I really try at least to come back and answer the question as to whether that was really the best way to do that and was I really thinking straight and how did my opponents behave and how did the judges behave was needed.
I still owe a duty of loyalty to my clients and former clients, so I cannot specify which clients I did not especially find congenial, but the cause was the same.
I think that it is important for people to understand that whether a good-guy or a bad-guy wins a case is less important than what the law is that the case results in.
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