Source: The Atlantic

The late Irving Feiner would have made a hell of a lawyer. After he spoke to my First Amendment class twenty years ago, a few students suggested he’d also have been a better professor than I. Professor Ralph Stein of Pace Law School told a newspaper that, after Feiner lectured to his class, “he had trouble leaving the class because the students kept talking to him. They would ask him to autograph their casebooks.”

But Feiner is the name of a landmark case rather than of a distinguished civil-liberties lawyer. That’s a shame—one that can be laid at the feet of the United States Supreme Court, which in 1951 affirmed Feiner’s state-court conviction for disorderly conduct. Feiner was expelled from Syracuse University, and his multiple admissions to law school were rescinded. He spent the rest of his life as a dealer in tropical fish—and as a civil-rights advocate and political activist (he helped form the Working Families Party, among other things). He died in 2009 in Valhalla, New York.

Counter demonstrators look over to those attending the “Freedom of Speech Rally Round II” outside the Islamic Community Center in Phoenix, Arizona May 29, 2015. More than 200 protesters, some armed, berated Islam and its Prophet Mohammed outside an Arizona mosque on Friday in a provocative protest that was denounced by counterprotesters shouting “Go home, Nazis,” weeks after an anti-Muslim event in Texas came under attack by two gunmen. REUTERS/Nancy Wiechec – RTR4Y3NV