A Conversation with Genevieve Lakier

We have a conversation with Genevieve Lakier about the First Amendment and the courts in our current situation. She defends recourse to the courts; we are as usual more skeptical. We go into some aspects of the political economy of major media, emphasizing the problems created by media consolidation and the difficulty of dealing with those problems not merely because of the normative issues we raised in discussing Jimmy Kimmel but also because the political-economic causes of consolidation play out as well in structuring the Supreme Court. And we talk about the distinction between the First Amendment as law and the First Amendment as a component of a general political culture that shapes both what the courts do and how ordinary politics plays itself out in expression-sensitive contexts.