The Magazine

Speaking Freely

The language of the Supreme Court on the subject of words.

Oct 26, 2009, Vol. 15, No. 06 • By KEVIN R. KOSAR
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Eloquence and Reason

Creating a First

Amendment Culture

by Robert L. Tsai

Yale, 216 pp., $45

As a schoolboy I had textbooks with photographs of the justices of the Supreme Court. In their black robes, they looked so very old and serious. What little information the books provided about these people stoked my reverence. They hailed from Harvard, Stanford, and other places far away from my hometown in Ohio, places populated with brilliant people who became the powerful people who appeared on the nightly news show that my mother and I watched â "senators, diplomats, and the rest.

Many nights I went to bed dreaming that one day, maybe, I could be a Supreme Court justice. I wanted to sit in one of the high-backed chairs on the dais as attorneys debated whether a particular statute offended the Law of the Land. I imagined myself at the center of terrific logical exchanges, parsing the precise language of the Constitution and analyzing the facts of a case. Ultimately, we the Court would come to a super-rational explanation that would irrefutably decide the matter for all time.

I understood that not every case had an easy answer. The Fourth Amendment forbids â unreasonable searches and seizures. â But what constitutes a search? May the FBI use infrared technology to peer into a home without obtaining a warrant? And I knew that the Court had goofed on occasion, such as when it decided in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) that blacks were not citizens. Nonetheless, I had faith that the Court usually would divine the truth.

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