"A superb history of the First Amendment and the body of law that has followed it...Timely and important, a work that astonishes and delights as it informs."

--Booklist

For many years, Anthony Lewis was the legal columnist for the New York Times in its heyday, before it became just another corporate media outlet living off its legacy and worried about offending the White House. Lewis understood -- and understands -- that our legal system is the dynamic glue that holds our diverse democracy together; when it fails or is corrupted, our democracy is at risk.

Reading Lewis's columns in the NYT during his tenure there was to gain a perspective on major legal flashpoints that was compassionate, lucid and took the longview.

Lewis understands that the founders of our revolutionary form of government created the most fundamental of rights: the right to free speech. But as with everything in a dynamic culture and political structure, even the right to free speech is an evolving legal concept.

In "Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment," Lewis offers an insightful, persuasive and accessible account of our right to free speech. Lewis argues that the First Amendment is at the heart of a free and vibrant society -- and laws that restrict it undermine the Constitutional underpinnings necessary to maintain a free society and liberty.

From the publisher, Basic Books:

"More than any other people on earth, Americans are free to say and write what they think. The media can air the secrets of the White House, the boardroom, or the bedroom with little fear of punishment or penalty. The reason for this extraordinary freedom is not a superior culture of tolerance, but just fourteen words in our most fundamental legal document: the free expression clauses of the First Amendment to the Constitution. In Lewis’s telling, the story of how the right of free expression evolved along with our nation makes a compelling case for the adaptability of our constitution.

Although Americans have gleefully and sometimes outrageously exercised their right to free speech since before the nation’s founding, the Supreme Court did not begin to recognize this right until 1919. Freedom of speech and the press as we know it today is surprisingly recent. Anthony Lewis tells us how these rights were created, revealing a story of hard choices, heroic (and some less heroic) judges, and fascinating and eccentric defendants who forced the legal system to come face-to-face with one of America’s great founding ideas."

Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Anthony Lewis was a columnist for the New York Times op-ed page from 1969 through 2001. Since 1983, Lewis has been the James Madison Visiting Professor at Columbia University. His previous three books are Gideon's Trumpet, which has sold nearly a million copies in over forty years in print; Portrait of a Decade; and Make No Law: The Sullivan Case and the First Amendment. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.