What has the First Amendment got to do with Emerson, Whitman and romance?

[alice wellintown]

Books of The Times; The First Amendment And Rebels It Protects
By HERBERT MITGANG
Published: January 02, 1991


A few more surprises are in store for readers of Steven H. Shiffrin's
"First Amendment, Democracy and Romance." The biggest one is that his
First Amendment exemplars aren't such history-making United States
Supreme Court justices as Oliver Wendell Holmes and William J. Brennan
but Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Mr. Shiffrin, a professor of law at Cornell University, doesn't write
with the clarity of Holmes and Mr. Brennan or in the spirit of Whitman
and Emerson. Few jurists or authors do. But those who go the distance
in his book will be challenged by his erudition and effort to take on
the big-league libertarians and claim that they don't go far enough.
Romantics in American life sought to emphasize "the passions against
abstract reason; the subjective against the objective; the concrete
and the particular against the general and the universal; activity,
dynamism and movement against the frozen, static and eternal." Emerson
spoke about the importance of dissent and intellectual independence;
Whitman stood for the need to combat the materialistic and vulgar
aspects of American culture.

http://www.nytimes.com/1991/01/02/books/books-of-the-times-the-first-amendment-and-rebels-it-protects.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm