Fishing for the First Amendment

Stanley Fish’s The First: How to Think About Hate Speech, Campus Speech, Religious Speech, Fake News, Post-Truth, and Donald Trump is an extended argument against what he sees as mistakenly broad interpretations of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, as well as its misapplication to particular settings, especially the academy (Chapter 3), and, in the case of religious expression, the public sphere (Chapter 4). With this provocative little book, the Floersheimer Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at Cardozo Law in New York, whom its website lauds as “one of this country’s leading public intellectuals, and a world-renowned literary theorist and legal scholar,”1is bound to raise the hackles of free speech advocates both within the academy (however few they may be) and outside of it. Fish’s distinguished career as a literary critic, and his appointments in law at