Lauren Tousignant
When Freedom Speaks serves as a reminder that the First Amendment is a living, breathing structure that continues to both challenge and reinforce our country’s definition of free speech. Lynn Greenky takes us on a thorough journey through all the trials and tribulations it has faced. Anyone with any opinion will benefit from reading this timely road map on the cornerstone of our Constitution.
Jonathan Collegio
Lynn Greenky’s new book is a tour de force on the importance of free speech to all individuals and groups in America - right, left, center and anyone who doesn’t conform to the prevailing wisdom of the day. …Greenky reminds us that free speech means tolerating one another - instead of silencing or jailing one another. And that’s worth fighting for.
New York Journal of Books
"When Freedom Speaks by Lynn Greenky is an excellent introduction and exploration of the contentious field of First Amendment jurisprudence. Both entertaining and educational, it provides the knowledge necessary for an informed electorate. Like a good legal conundrum, it offers opportunities to ask important questions and spark lively arguments."
David Cole
Lynn Greenky offers a spirited and engaging examination of the individuals, groups, and movements that have advanced free speech protections by standing up and speaking out. When Freedom Speaks is an accessible guide to the past, present, and future of free speech in the United States.
Communication and Democracy
Greenky is particularly attentive to the relationship between precedent, innovation, and power.
Library Journal
04/01/2022
Greenky (communication and rhetorical studies, Syracuse Univ.) maps the history of the First Amendment's free speech clause from its foundation and building blocks to contemporary controversies. In 15 chapters, she lays out types of speech—protected and unprotected, symbolic, political, offensive, harmful, and hate—that have posed significant complications. She also considers problematic issues such as speech in public schools and other public places, the right to speak through silence, and both sides of the battle to speak, shout, protest, or counsel about abortion. Drawing on her training as a lawyer, Greenky locates notable inflection points and lays out the processes, patterns, and developments that have formed paradigms for U.S. Supreme Court decisions and doctrines. Her discussions of issues feature stories of the people whose contentions brought cases to court, as in the collision between free speech and free exercise of religion in the Supreme Court's 2018 Masterpiece Cakeshop decision and its 2010 campaign financing "money as speech" decision in Citizens United. VERDICT Complete with a glossary of legal terms, Greenky's easy-to-read primer offers general readers and students a telling history and framework for understanding the basic assumptions, ways of thinking, and methodologies courts commonly use to negotiate clashing and competing constitutional values and individual rights to free speech.—Thomas J. Davis
