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Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber made his name in the academy as a constitutional law professor. Since he is now the president of a pacesetting Ivy League institution, he is also at the forefront of the free-speech wars. It’s understandable, given those two pieces of information, that Eisgruber would seek to enlighten readers of Terms of Respect by analyzing the relationship between constitutional law—particularly the First Amendment’s protection of the freedom of speech--and campus speech-related controversies. It’s expected, even.
Yet Eisgruber manages to surprise his readers with his understanding of the relationship between the law of speech and contemporary controversies. The First Amendment was ratified in 1791, but Eisgruber takes his cues from the 1960s. “The American doctrine of free speech as we know it today emerged in the 1960s,” he writes. “Until 1964, the United States Supreme Court had a lackluster track record in free speech cases.” It was then that the Court decided New York Times v. Sullivan, a First Amendment case that shows, in Eisgruber’s view, “the important historical and conceptual links between free speech and the American struggle for racial equality.”
