Floyd Abrams

“It concludes that the central purpose of the First Amendment was to impose strict limits on governmental authority over religion, speech, and press and that recent arguments, primarily by liberal jurists and scholars, to the contrary are unpersuasive. It offers a look at life in the United States until well into the twentieth century, a period during which the First Amendment was virtually unrecognizable to anyone today who was transported back to that time, a time a few years before socialists (including presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs) would be imprisoned for their opposition to America's participation in the First World War. So insignificant a role did the First Amendment then play that a novel such as Ulysses could not be legally sold in the United States until the 1930s and criticism of the judiciary was subject to stern sanctions until the 1940s. So hidden was the authority of the First Amendment that not a single act of Congress was held unconstitutional under it until 1965.”
― Floyd Abrams, The Soul of the First Amendment