ABSTRACT
8 I began teaching at the University of Chicago in the late 1960s, and I was fortunate enough to develop a close relationship there with one of the leading free speech scholars of the period, Harry Kalven, Jr. See Owen M. Fiss, Kalven’s Way, 43 University of Chicago Law Review 4 (1975). In the fall of 1974, just after I moved to Yale, Kalven died and left on his desk a huge manuscript that he had begun only a few years earlier. Jamie Kalven, Harry s son, then began the almost impossible task of readying this manuscript for publication. For the next decade or so, I worked closely with Jamie on the project. See Editor s Note to Harry Kalven, Jr., A Worthy Tradition (1988).
When the process of editing the Kalven manuscript was nearly complete, I turned to the First Amendment itself and began teaching and writing in the field. I soon grew uneasy with Kalven s celebratory mood toward the then prevailing body of decisions on free speech—a mood that pervaded his book and was aptly captured by its title. I kept wondering why I had such a different reaction to the received tradition. Part of it, I realized, was due to a difference in our dispositions—Harry always saw the best in things. In time, however, I came to the conclusion that our difference arose primarily from the fact that Harry had premised his analysis on a paradigm that struck me as outmoded: the street corner speaker.
In the essay that follows—-first presented in November 1985 as the John F. Murray Lecture at the University of Iowa College of Law and published the next year in the Iowa Law Review—I pursued this thought and proposed that we shift the organizing free speech paradigm from the street corner to CBS. Now, a decade later, I find myself confronting the question whether the CBS paradigm itself has been rendered obsolete by the technological revolution that has carried us into cyberspace. See In Search of a New Paradigm, 104 Yale Law Journal 1613 (1995).
