Born in 1853, Jared Flagg was the black sheep of an illustrious New York family. His father, Jared Bradley Flagg, was a noted portraitist and Episcopalian minister who served as Rector of Grace Church, in Brooklyn Heights. His older brothers were prominent, Paris-trained artists in their own right. A younger brother became a famous architect, while another went on to found a major Wall Street brokerage. One of his younger sisters married publisher Charles Scribner, II; another was a member of the famed "400" Manhattan socialites. Jared, Jr., on the other hand, took to the seamier side of American life, instigating any number of illegal schemes, ranging from leasing furnished flats to facilitate prostitution, to finding chorus line and modeling jobs for pretty but talentless young women, to a phony investment scheme that paid 52% a year, to the sale of worthless bonds backed by heavily mortgaged real estate. Frequently penalized for his criminal and unethical activities by the time of his death in 1926, Jared Flagg barreled his way through Gilded and Jazz Age America, offering a fascinating and heretofore unknown view of how a rising empire evolved at a crucial through crucial eras in its history.

Free speech and freedom of the press were often suppressed amid the social turbulence of the Progressive Era and World War I. As muckrakers, feminists, pacifists, anarchists, socialists, and communists were arrested or censored for their outspoken views, many of them turned to a Manhattan lawyer named Gilbert Roe to keep them in business and out of jail. Roe was the principal trial lawyer of the Free Speech League-a precursor of the American Civil Liberties Union. His cases involved such activists as Emma Goldman, Lincoln Steffens, Margaret Sanger, Max Eastman, Upton Sinclair, John Reed, and Eugene Debs, as well as the socialist magazine The Masses and the New York City Teachers Union. A friend of Wisconsin's progressive senator Robert La Follette since their law partnership as young men, Roe defended "Fighting Bob" when the Senate tried to expel him for opposing America's entry into World War I. In articulating and upholding Americans' fundamental right to free expression against charges of obscenity, libel, espionage, sedition, or conspiracy during turbulent times, Roe was rarely successful in the courts. But his battles illuminate the evolution of free speech doctrine and practice in an era when it was under heavy assault. His greatest victory, including the 1917 decision by Judge Learned Hand in The Masses Publishing Co. v. Patten, is still influential today.

Mobilizing the Press examines the role of the press in constitutional litigation before the United States Supreme Court to shape the First Amendment doctrine that forms the legal environment in which journalists operate. The book shows that the Court has consistently ruled in favor of the press's interpretation of the First Amendment on publishing issues such as prior restraints, libel, and privacy, but has not been persuaded that the First Amendment protects newsgathering, as in reporters' privilege, cameras in courtrooms, and ride-along cases. The book focuses on three important case studies and surveys the evolution of constitutional press law before and between the case studies. It demonstrates how the institutional press has played a significant, if not always decisive, role in that evolution. Eric B. Easton is Professor of Law at the University of Baltimore School of Law, where he has taught Communications Law, Legal Writing, and other subjects for 20 years. Before joining the UB faculty, he taught Media Law, Reporting, and Editing at Loyola University-Maryland. He has also taught Comparative Media Law at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, and Copyright and Constitutional Law at Shandong University, China, and Comparative Cyberlaw at the University of Curacao. He has been a visiting scholar at the Journalism Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. Before joining the academy, Professor Easton was a professional journalist for more than 20 years. He currently serves as editor of the scholarly Journal of Media Law & Ethics and as a member of the editorial advisory board of The Daily Record, Maryland's business and legal newspaper. Professor Easton holds a B.S. from the Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University, a J.D. from the Francis King Carey School of Law, University of Maryland-Baltimore, and a Ph.D. from the Philip Merrill College of Journalism, University of Maryland-College Park. He has authored more than 15 law review articles and delivered a similar number of academic presentations in this country and overseas. He was also the general editor of the second edition of the American Bar Association's Sourcebook on Legal Writing Programs.