Mobilizing the Press examines the role of the press in constitutional litigation before the United States Supreme Court to shape the First Amendment doctrine that forms the legal environment in which journalists operate. The book shows that the Court has consistently ruled in favor of the press's interpretation of the First Amendment on publishing issues such as prior restraints, libel, and privacy, but has not been persuaded that the First Amendment protects newsgathering, as in reporters' privilege, cameras in courtrooms, and ride-along cases. The book focuses on three important case...

Free speech and freedom of the press were often suppressed amid the social turbulence of the Progressive Era and World War I. As muckrakers, feminists, pacifists, anarchists, socialists, and communists were arrested or censored for their outspoken views, many of them turned to a Manhattan lawyer named Gilbert Roe to keep them in business and out of jail.

Roe was the principal trial lawyer of the Free Speech League--a precursor of the American Civil Liberties Union. His cases involved such activists as Emma Goldman, Lincoln Steffens, Margaret Sanger, Max Eastman, Upton Sinclair, John Reed,...