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CONTACT: Peter Bermudes FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

gail leondar public relations February 2015
781-648-1658 - gail@glprbooks.com

“In the dark art of lawyering, Neuborne has always been considered a white knight.”
—New York Magazine

"A brilliant book that offers an original and insightful way of understanding the First Amendment and
all of the Bill of Rights."
—Ermin Chemerinsky, author of The Conservative Assault on the Constitution

"[Neuborne] has long been one of the nation's most passionate champions for the Constitution. Here he
applies the insight of a lifetime to illuminate James Madison's true legacy."
—Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice and author of
The Second Amendment: A Biography

Madison’s Music
On Reading the First Amendment
by Burt Neuborne

The First Amendment is a cornerstone of American democracy, summing up our democratic process
in a succinct 45 words. Yet too often, a Supreme Court that fails to relate to the text as a coherent
whole warps the original purpose of the First Amendment. Burt Neuborne, the former national legal
director of the ACLU, urges us to go back to the basics and reconsider the profound structure of James
Madison’s words. What if we were to read the First Amendment with the same care and intensity with
which we read a poem?

Throughout history, judges have ignored the full structure and meaning of the First Amendment,
focusing instead on fragments of the text as self-contained commands used to interpret the law.
Though the First Amendment considers everything from freedom of and from religion to the freedom
of speech and assembly, judges often isolate choice phrases that belie the full arc of the text. When
words are dropped or added, or when freedom of speech is honored while freedom of religion, press,
and assembly are not, the beauty of American democracy—Madison’s music—is lost.

Madison’s Music examines how the fragmentation of the First Amendment leads to gerrymandered
districts, a government run by the wealthy, and the disenfranchisement of many. In a stirring chronicle
of and ode to the First Amendment’s “narrative of democracy,” Neuborne shows us how we can
recapture the democratic essence of our most important text.



Burt Neuborne is the Inez Milholland Professor of Civil Liberties and the founding legal director of
the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School. He is the author of three scholarly books and
numerous scholarly articles and is a contributor to The Nation. He played Jerry Falwell’s lawyer in
Milos Forman’s The People v. Larry Flynt and was the Court TV commentator for the trial of O.J.
Simpson. He lives in New York.

The New Press • February 2015 • $25.95 • Hardcover • 272 pages • ISBN 978-1-62097-041-6