CONFESSIONS OF A FREE SPEECH LAWYER

Nobody was prepared for a white supremacist to ram his car into the crowd at the rally, killing Heather Heyer and injuring many other counterprotestors. Who was to blame? Smolla, a civil liberties lawyer and dean of the Widener University Delaware Law School, weighs the evidence in a tangled mix of memoir, legal scholarship, and a timeline of the actions of the police, demonstrators, and elected officials on Aug. 12. The author sets the stage by analyzing related First Amendment cases, showing that while the U.S. Supreme Court has moved to the right, the liberal and conservative justices remain “remarkably aligned” on one issue: free speech, and especially the idea that laws can’t suppress it just because it offends “the prevailing views of good order and morality.” Since the 1960s, free speech has gained enough protections that people of any political stripe may take violent offense to its messages, a possibility for which Charlottesville was inadequately prepared. In the run-up to the rally, writes Smolla, “the lines of communication and coordination among the four law enforcement agencies in and around Charlottesville were shockingly deficient.” The Charlottesville Police Department and the Virginia State Police, for example, didn’t establish radio communications on the same channel. The author gives a repetitious and poorly edited account of such lapses; the narrative lacks the polish of far better memoirs by crusading lawyers, such as Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy. Yet it’s hard to imagine a mayor or police chief who—in planning for the arrival of controversial figures—wouldn’t profit from Smolla’s account of the cascade of missteps in Charlottesville. Ultimately, the raw facts of the events described transcend their disorganized presentation.

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