The Metropolitan Opera. (Photo: niallkennedy / Flickr)

Opera diehards, as a rule, couldn't care less about the present; it is the past and the future that energize them. At any given intermission, they’ll refer to the performance at hand, but generally just to make the point (A) that someone sang the role better in 1952 and (B) that this awful soprano has no business planning to sing Norma in three years.

But while the past is over and done with, if ripe for endless rehashing, the operatic future has lately come under new scrutiny.

Since 1996 Brad Wilber, a reference librarian and crossword puzzle enthusiast, has published Met Futures, an online list of repertory and casting for upcoming seasons at the Metropolitan Opera. Drawing on information in the public domain and tips from sources, it’s a valuable, dependable, much-loved resource, providing a wide-angle view of the Met’s artistic direction and singers’ choices. (Anna Netrebko is singing her first-ever Tatyana in Eugene Onegin in 2013-14! La Donna del Lago has its Met premiere two years after that!)

This being opera, the list has also been the fodder for gleeful gossip, with a small but influential readership. Its updates have been regularly picked up by other blogs, and Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, has referred to it in interviews.

In May, Mr. Wilber was contacted by the Met for the first time. He received a phone call from Sharon Grubin, the company’s general counsel, who asked Mr. Wilber to take down Met Futures. Though Mr. Wilber, 41, has long included a disclaimer on the site (“Keep in mind that although I try to post only solid information, the information should always be treated as merely speculative. I am in no way affiliated with the Metropolitan Opera”), the Met didn’t think it went far enough.

“She said their uppermost reason was that the site contains errors,” he said in a phone interview last week from his office at Houghton College, a small liberal arts school about 60 miles southeast of Buffalo, “and those errors, whatever percentage, create mistaken expectations on the part of the public, even with my disclaimer. And that it also sometimes muddied negotiations with artists. They said that that created difficulty for them.”

Others would disagree with the Met’s assessment of the list’s accuracy. “The accuracy of Brad's site was quite spectacular one to two seasons in advance,” said James Jorden, the publisher of the opera gossip and discussion blog Parterre.com. “For example, six months before the Met announced their 2011-12 season in February 2011, Brad had the entire repertory and all major casting in place and, as it turned out, it was 100% correct. Farther down the line there were some predictions that might have been inaccurate, or else the Met might have changed their plans. For example, I remember a couple of years ago Brad predicted that the Met would do Rienzi around 2014: that prediction stayed in place for a few months and then disappeared from the Futures entirely.”

The list never included Mr. Wilber’s own speculations, and he was diligent about adjusting incorrect information. “I made pretty sure that I didn’t put up something that I hadn’t seen in print or on a website or in a direct communication,” Mr. Wilber said. “I never ever put any guesswork or assumptions on there.”

But Mr. Wilber agreed to remove the list, which he did early last week. “I’m not by nature an especially subversive person,” he said. “And I always told myself that if it got to the point where the Met expressed concern I would take it down.”

Representatives from the Met’s communications department offered him some CDs, which he accepted, and they spoke with him about the tone and content of his farewell post. (In response to an interview request, the company released a statement: “The Met asked Mr. Wilber to please stop providing unconfirmed information about future seasons, and he agreed.”)

Several lawyers with experience in similar matters agreed that the Met lacks a compelling legal claim in the case.

“I don’t know the facts of the situation involving the Met,” the noted First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams said in an email, “but as a general matter the Met has no legal right to control what is said about it unless the material published is libelous or written in a way to suggest falsely that the Met itself is the author. Material in the public domain may freely be described so long as the copyright laws are adhered to and non-defamatory material from sources may be published whether or not it was confirmed.”

Hopefully Mr. Wilber will reconsider his decision and put his list back online. But even if he doesn’t, I spoke with other bloggers who expressed interest in hosting a similar feature. It would be deeply unfortunate if the Met attempted to pursue such a weak case against any of these people, who would almost certainly lack the company’s legal and financial resources. The fact that the company cannot seem to control leaks of information, to Mr. Wilber and others, is not the bloggers’ problem. It’s the Met’s.

The attempt to silence Mr. Wilber is comical, particularly since the Met Futures list pointed to a healthy artistic future, studded with new operas, expansions of the repertory, and exciting directors like Dmitri Tcherniakov. It seems like the company should have other priorities than intimidating a fan whose work provides a resource for other fans—a site that, at the end of the day, just increases excitement about the Met’s offerings.

With a music director whose health problems make his every appearance a crapshoot, a folly of a Ring production whose massive set cost millions and tends to break down, and a marked lack of success developing homegrown productions, is this really what the Met is choosing to spend its time on?

Well, at least there is the 2016-17 season to look forward to; according to Mr. Wilber’s last update, it will feature a new production of Verdi’s Otello starring Aleksandrs Antonenko and Dmitri Hvorostovsky and a revival of Rossini’s Armida with Diana Damrau.

“If the departure of the Met Futures list leaves you missing it,” he said in the farewell post on his site, “I’m sorry about that. I will really miss it too, you can be sure. But I plan to continue offering the Met all my usual forms of support — attending performances in the house, going to the cinema for live-in-HD presentations, listening via radio, etc. I hope you’ll do the same.”

Viewers of Mr. Dobb’s CNN show, Lou Dobbs Tonight, would not have been surprised by his populist-tinged tirades against the Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, Big Media, the National Council of La Raza, and the political leadership of both the Republican and Democratic parties.

But he may have caught some members of the audience by surprise when he passionately argued against the celebration of Columbus Day.

“Columbus wasn’t even the one who got here first, it should be Norwegian Day,” said Mr. Dobbs.

In an act of even greater provocation, Mr. Dobbs – whose wife is Mexican-American – announced his support for increasing interracial marriage, “at a huge velocity,” so as to remedy the fact that Americans are “focusing too much on our differences.” (Paging Senator Bulworth!)

In actual news, he is “not interested in being a Presidential candidate,” he told Mr. Abrams. Electoral politics are, he said, “not in my nature.”

But then! “I am only a candidate of last resort.”

“We had a little song we sang,” said the younger Mr. Abrams, now 40, who in the intervening years has attended law school, earned a living as a television legal correspondent and, as of six months ago, served as the general manager of MSNBC. Dan claimed no memory of most of the words. Floyd remembered it perfectly and happily sang a verse. (The song goes to the tune of “Frère Jacques.”)

“Going to the o-ffice. / Going to the o-ffice. Yes, we are. / Yes, we are. / Daddy will read a bookie. / Daniel will eat a cookie. / Yes, we are.”

The elder Mr. Abrams, 70, is a leading First Amendment attorney and a partner at Cahill, Gordon & Reindel. He said that he raised his two children—Dan and his sister, chief of the general-crimes bureau at the U.S. Attorney’s office Ronnie Abrams, 38—just as he had been raised: “with the air of the law in my own home.” At night, instead of bedtime stories, he told legal morality tales: for example, one about a 19th-century Kentucky schoolteacher who bought coal to heat her classroom and sued the school district after it declined to reimburse her. Earlier in the evenings, he would try out closing arguments on the children.

“There was a time, when Ronnie was around 11, when I used to use her in particular as a sounding board for oral arguments,” said Mr. Abrams père. “I found that she had about the same level of patience as most judges. She would say, ‘What are your cases about?’ She’d listen for a minute or two. She’d ask, ‘What do you say? And what do they say?’ Then she would rule.”

Efrat, Mr. Abrams’ wife—a former Hebrew-school teacher and Guggenheim docent—is the only non-J.D. in the immediate family. (The extended Abramses include some non-lawyers—and Floyd’s first cousin Elliott, President Bush’s deputy national-security advisor, with whom the New York Abramses maintain distant, if not chilly, relations.)

Dinner-table conversations can get wonky. “There are definitely times when my mother feels left out,” said her son.

Mr. Abrams senior grew up in New York, first in the Bronx, then in Queens. His father manufactured artificial flowers; his mother stayed home. He considered becoming an academic, but chose Yale Law School when he realized that he couldn’t satisfy the two-language requirement of the Graduate Record Exams. His children trained as lawyers because what else were they going to become?

Ronnie was bound for the bar at an early age. Dan followed the same track, but spent much of his youth aspiring to be the next Ted Koppel. Not till he had his law degree in hand and a clerkship beckoning, though, did he veer off into television.

“If my dad had been a real legal purist,” said the son, “he would’ve said, ‘Come on—you can’t give up a prestigious clerkship.’ He was very encouraging of my taking a $22,000-a-year job at Court TV.”

While the Abrams lawyers consult each other frequently on legal matters, father and son claim not to have run into any serious conflicts of interest.

“There have been some amusing moments,” said Floyd. The elder Mr. Abrams made a number of television appearances during the 2000 Presidential-election dispute. “I was on Dan’s show when he had a program together with Geraldo, and I was on and Dan was doing the interviewing on it. They had one of these boxes where you have four people on screen at once; it looks like you’re on Hollywood Squares or something. Anyway, he asked the first person for his views, then the second, then the third, then he came to me. I realized he didn’t know what to call me.”

During the first exchange, Dan called his father “Mr. Abrams.”

“Apparently, there was laughter in his ear from his studio,” Floyd Abrams said. “So the next time, he said, ‘Floyd, what do you think about that?’ Apparently, there was louder laughter. The last time he called on me, he said, ‘Well, I now call on the chief justice in our home.’”

They wanted to rent, and saw a duplex condo at 148-150 Waverly Place that was looking for a tenant.

“The funny thing is,” said Derek Olsen, a broker at Prudential Douglas Elliman who worked with Mr. Abrams, “he didn’t want this apartment. It was his girlfriend that wanted it.”

Early last year, though, Ms. Röhm moved out after a reportedly amicable breakup, and Mr. Abrams was on his own in the Greenwich Village apartment.

He apparently grew to like it over time. In June, just seven days after being promoted to general manager of his 10-year-old cable news channel, he signed a $2.17 million deal to buy the place.

“I was surprised that he came through,” said Mr. Olsen of the buy—considering how long it took him to cozy up to the place. But of course it makes sense.

“He has so much responsibility—he stopped throwing away money,” Mr. Olsen said. “He invested in his own equity.”

Mr. Abrams would not comment on the deal.

He is the son of Floyd Abrams, the First Amendment lawyer who has recently defended Al Franken and Judy Miller.

What’s in store for Mr. Abrams and his Greenwich Village duplex? According to the Elliman listing for the Waverly apartment, it is “a perfect place to raise a family.”

Any takers?

—Max Abelson

G.O.P. Booster Sells for $9.5 M.

One of New York’s most influential Republican fund-raisers has just sold his townhouse at 177 East 71st Street, in which he’s entertained everyone from Margaret Thatcher to Karl Rove over the years, for $9.5 million.

Mallory Factor, the founder of the monthly lunch known as the Monday Meeting, a powerful Grand Hyatt get-together of national Republicans, sold the house to Perry Dean Rogers president Steven Foote, the architect who renovated Branford and Saybrook colleges at Yale.

According to Mr. Factor, the townhouse was built in 1908 for real-estate mogul Douglas Elliman; furniture-design icon Angelo Donghia owned the house too, from 1968 to 1988, keeping an entire floor for his work.

The building is located on one of three blocks between Third and Lexington avenues that have been included within the Upper East Side Historic District. At 8,750 square feet, the home has eight bedrooms and six baths.

“There’s a sixth floor for houseman living space,” said Mr. Factor’s broker, Roger Erickson, the senior managing director of Sotheby’s International Realty. “And an English basement”--complete with exercise room and wine cellar--“yet from the street it looks like a four-story.”

Mr. Factor bought the house in 1999 for $5.05 million. “He went to a dinner party there and liked it so much that he bought it that night,” explained Mr. Erickson.

Though sentimentally attached to the enormous house, the Factors said they needed a house configured with more family space.

“We didn’t have the heart to dismantle what we considered to be a magnificent formal-entertaining home,” explained Mr. Factor.

A Web site run by the nonprofit group Public Citizen reports that in 2002, Mr. Factor hosted a “$10,000-a-plate fundraiser in his home to help the GOP regain U.S. Senate control.”

“The President wasn’t there,” Mr. Factor said.

--M.A.

Live Under Barbara Walters, For $19 M.

The residence of the late Lilyan Spitzer Lindemann, who passed away last May, has just hit the market for a staggering $18.9 million.

The full-floor apartment is just one floor below Barbara Walters’, at the co-op building at 944 Fifth Avenue.

Designed by Nathan Korn, the 14-story prewar building has had other boldface residents besides Ms. Walters, including Peter Guber, the former chairman and chief executive of Sony Pictures Entertainment, who now heads Mandalay Entertainment Group.

The Lindemann apartment has four bedrooms, three and a half baths and five maids’ rooms. There is also a living room, library, private gallery and central reception room.

Some notable details include Louis XV–style paneling, French doors and marble floors.

Located just a few blocks from the Metropolitan Museum, the fifth-floor spread includes Central Park views.

While the Lindemann estate is trying to unload this tony residence, the grandson of Lilyan has been busy in the luxury co-op market, too. Art collector Adam Lindemann and his estranged wife Elizabeth recently sold their apartment at 730 Park Avenue, according to The New York Times. Slightly more expensive than the 944 Fifth digs, that apartment was listed at $21 million.

Brokers Edward Lee Cave and Caroline Guthrie have the listing. Ms. Guthrie did not respond to several calls for comment on the estate sale.

—Michael Calderone

The Green-House Effect: $7.7 M.

A latter-day architectural landmark at 156 Reade Street in Tribeca has just been sold for $7.7 million.

The unusual façade of the 6,000-square-foot residential townhouse—one of Tribeca’s early “green” buildings—was fabricated in 2000 and 2001 from a single piece of black-painted recycled steel, interrupted only by towering windows.

But most advanced of all is the building’s geothermal heating and cooling system: Like three nearby townhouses designed by the same architect, the home is heated and cooled by pipes stretching 1,200 feet below ground.

The four Reade Street townhouses were built on spec by the late architect John Petrarca, and when they were done, he moved his family into 156. His widow, Sarah Bartlett, was the seller in the building’s latest transaction.

Completed only months before Sept. 11, critic Alexander Gorlin called the home a Tribeca “landmark,” pointing out that though it is barely six blocks removed from Ground Zero, its unique “structural and ventilation systems minimized environmental dust and debris.”

Aside from arcane architectural inducements, there are amenities with more universal appeal for a Manhattan townhouse: In addition to four bedrooms and a solarium penthouse, there are 875 square feet of terraces.

Bruce Ehrmann, the Tribeca broker and executive vice president at Stribling & Associates who organized the deal, estimated that the townhouse had been on the market for seven months, but would not discuss prices. Still, the attractions of a “green” house are certainly greater than they were when Petrarca was selling the three houses neighboring his, Mr. Ehrmann remembered.

“I advised that the houses really couldn’t be sold on the basis of ‘green’—it really wasn’t what [buyers] wanted to hear in the multimillion-dollar range. But now that’s all different,” admitted Mr. Ehrmann, reached by phone on vacation in Montpellier, France.

But Petrarca had a knack for selling odd properties. Before building the townhouses, Petrarca and his family had lived in the triangular-shaped building next-door at 158 Reade Street, which the architect had bought 20 years earlier for $120,000. The building is only 11 feet wide in the front and three feet wide in the back, totaling 1,800 square feet.

But in July 1999, Petrarca reached an agreement with the filmmaking brothers Joel and Ethan Coen to sell them the building for use as their new offices for $1.5 million.

“It was going to be their house for their entire lives,” said Mr. Ehrmann about Petrarca’s original plans for the townhouse his widow just sold. The architect died in 2003 of lung cancer.

“A wonderful, wonderful man,” Mr. Ehrmann said. “An historic preservationist, a visionary architect, a gentle person, an intellectual.”

—M.A.

Test-Prep King Scores $7.2 M.

Jonathan Grayer, the chairman and C.E.O. of test-prep company Kaplan, has recently sold his Upper West Side condo for $7.195 million, according to city records.

First listed in February for $6.995 million, the apartment was quickly scooped up: A contract was signed less than a month later.

Since September 2000, Mr. Grayer has owned the 10-room apartment on West 86th Street (and still maintains a residence in Westchester).

The 4,100-square-foot apartment includes five bedrooms and four and a half baths. (And the master-suite bath includes a Jacuzzi tub.)

Two balconies offer plenty of outdoor space, with views of southern gardens below.

Built in 1998, the Westbury House condominium features a state-of-the-art gym as well as a children’s play area.

Broker Lisa Lippman, of Brown Harris Stevens, had the listing. She declined to comment. Through a spokesperson, Mr. Grayer declined to comment.

—M.C.

But one name lower down the list may mean more to contemporary New York politics: Michael Hardy.

That's because Hardy is Al Sharpton's lawyer.

Floyd Abrams, the First Amendment lawyer hired by The Times to help handle Ms. Miller’s showdown with Mr. Fitzgerald, told The Observer “it would be awkward” for him to offer Ms. Miller legal advice now.

“It’s one thing to represent her and to keep her confidences in the battle against Fitzgerald, but that’s a different situation than the situation in which there may be differences between her and the paper itself,” Mr. Abrams said, adding that he remains close to Ms. Miller.

And who was representing the paper? The Times’ ultimate decision maker, publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., was a vanishing presence. As other layers of Ms. Miller’s support fell noisily away, there was no support from her from the publisher; he has not been seen by reporters in the newsroom since Oct. 3, when he triumphantly led Ms. Miller home from jail—although, according to multiple newsroom sources, on the morning of Oct. 24, he met with Ms. Miller in his office. A Times spokesperson declined to confirm that the meeting had taken place.

“There is a certain amount of chaos,” a Times staffer said. “Everyone is talking about the publisher.”

The editors of The Times had begun overtly turning against Ms. Miller a week earlier, on Tuesday, Oct. 18, at the weekly third-floor meeting of masthead editors. Executive editor Bill Keller wasn’t there—he was in Beijing, on a tour of foreign bureaus; nor was managing editor Jill Abramson, who was off delivering a speech at Middlebury College in Vermont. With managing editor John Geddes presiding, the editors at the meeting agreed that the paper was in crisis, and that the roiling would persist until Ms. Miller left The Times, according to a person who was present.

“It was unanimous,” the source said. “People said we have a real problem, because the newsroom is worried what will happen to her next. They want her to be dealt with decisively, and they want her to be dealt with more aggressively.”

Yet, Ms. Miller was still on board. On Oct. 19, she appeared before Congress to testify for a federal shield law to protect reporters from being compelled to reveal their sources. But she was going it alone.

“That she’s still being permitted to appear publicly as a rep of the paper is shocking,” a Times staffer said of Ms. Miller’s testimony.

While in D.C., Ms. Miller didn’t visit the paper’s Washington bureau. Meanwhile Mr. Keller, facing questions from public editor Byron Calame about the whole Miller episode, began distancing himself from the go-to-the-mat-for-Judy strategy. “If I had known the details of Judy’s engagement with Libby, I’d have been more careful in how the paper articulated its defense,” Mr. Keller wrote Mr. Calame, on the same day that Ms. Miller went to Capitol Hill.

But the vaporous sense that Ms. Miller had under protection from the top of the paper was hard to shake.

“Like any perception in any newsroom, it takes on a life of its own,” one staffer said. “If someone perceives someone to be protected by the publisher, it’s like there’s a force field put around them. If Bill perceived Arthur is protecting Judy, then it’s real protection. Bill is the one who has to decide what Judy’s assignment will be, and whether she lives up to the standards of the newspaper.”

Mr. Sulzberger declined repeated requests for an interview.

By that week’s end, the movement picked up speed. On Friday, as the unhappy newsroom began to grumble about the executive editor’s absence, with sources calling his Asia trip a “junket,” Mr. Keller sent a version of his note to Mr. Calame out to the staff. Mr. Sulzberger received advance notice a few hours before it hit inboxes, according to someone familiar with the matter.

Shortly after that, Maureen Dowd filed the first major Op-Ed piece in weeks on the subject of Ms. Miller. The lack of Op-Ed discussion, Ms. Dowd said, didn’t reflect a desire to protect a colleague or the paper. “I just have to say that anybody who thought that we were expected to be silent to help out was wrong,” she said.

But when the silence broke, it broke definitively. Mr. Keller lamented Ms. Miller’s “entanglement” with Vice Presidential chief of staff I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby; on Saturday, Ms. Dowd declared in her column that if Ms. Miller resumed her job, “the institution most in danger would be the newspaper in your hands”; on Sunday, in his public editor’s column, Mr. Calame wrote that it will be “difficult for her to return to the paper as a reporter.”

Meanwhile, Mr. Sulzberger had become virtually invisible. The reporters and editors who had produced The Times’ 5,800-word Oct. 16 piece on Ms. Miller’s legal battles never heard from Mr. Sulzberger after the story ran.

Mr. Sulzberger did, however, weigh in to tell Mr. Calame that he disputed one of his key quotes in the story—in which Mr. Sulzberger had said, describing the paper’s legal strategy, “This car had her hand on the wheel,” meaning Ms. Miller’s hand. Mr. Sulzberger felt the quote hadn’t been presented “in the proper context,” as the public editor recounted it. In an earlier interview, Mr. Sulzberger explained to Mr. Calame, he had said that “there were other hands on the wheel as well.”

Embattled public figures have often blamed newspapers for misusing quotes. But this was the publisher of The New York Times accusing his own newspaper of misrepresenting his remarks—shades of Charles Barkley being “misquoted” in his autobiography.

But Mr. Sulzberger is not a roly-poly N.B.A. legend, and nobody was laughing about it. Multiple sources at The Times said that Mr. Sulzberger had been complaining about his own paper to associates in private.

Deputy managing editor Jon Landman, who headed the Miller-coverage team, said by phone that his reporters had quoted Mr. Sulzberger in the proper context. Mr. Landman said he’d met with Mr. Calame for 45 minutes to discuss the quotation and had provided the public editor with transcripts from Mr. Sulzberger’s interviews.

Mr. Landman suggested to The Observer that interested parties ask Mr. Calame “for the stuff I sent him. Read it, and then everyone can draw their own conclusions.”

Mr. Calame declined a request to supply the transcripts.

Sources familiar with the interviews, however, said that the “hand on the wheel” metaphor first appeared in a question from reporter Janny Scott on Oct. 5. “It did seem like [Ms. Miller’s] hand was on the wheel?” Ms. Scott asked, to which Mr. Sulzberger replied that several participants had mutually driven the legal strategy.

A week later, talking to Times reporters Don Van Natta and Adam Liptak, Mr. Sulzberger brought up the metaphor on his own. He had been asked, “Were you comfortable with the level of information you were getting?”

Then Mr. Sulzberger responded that Ms. Miller had the wheel, “because,” he said, “she was the one at risk.”

But who was driving?

People familiar with the legal decisions in the Miller case have described, in public comments and private interviews, a process in which Ms. Miller and Mr. Sulzberger offered substantial guidance—and in which Ms. Miller took a more central role as the case wore on.

In August 2004, when Mr. Fitzgerald subpoenaed Ms. Miller to testify before the grand jury investigating the leaking of C.I.A. operative Valerie Plame Wilson’s identity, The Times’ legal team was a team largely in agreement, according to someone familiar with the matter.

The group setting the strategy included Times in-house lawyer George Freeman, outside counsel Mr. Abrams, Ms. Miller, Mr. Sulzberger, Mr. Keller and Russell Lewis, then president and C.E.O. of the New York Times Company, among others.

The group’s instinctive impulse was to resist the subpoena. The Times had resisted many in the past, for the sake of the principle of a free and independent press, and Mr. Fitzgerald’s reliance on waivers from other journalists’ sources struck the group as coercive and open to abuse.

But there were problems with a pure First Amendment defense: The confidential source that Ms. Miller wanted to protect was not some low-level whistleblower, but rather a powerful, high-ranking official, Mr. Libby. And the case law was not favorable.

According to someone familiar with the matter, it was the lawyers who proposed softening the absolute journalists’-rights position and reaching out to the special prosecutor to see if Mr. Fitzgerald would agree to limit his questions to a single source, as well as to Mr. Libby’s lawyer, Joseph Tate, to see if his client might be willing to assure Ms. Miller that his waiver was freely given.

“It did not take any convincing, at least in my presence, to get Arthur to agree,” Mr. Abrams said. “He thought it was a good idea. Judy was less enthusiastic.”

Ms. Miller came around to that point of view. But Mr. Fitzgerald wouldn’t agree to limit his questioning—and Mr. Tate, in Mr. Abrams’ estimation, sent mixed signals about the waiver. (Mr. Tate has publicly disputed Mr. Abrams’ claim that he was unclear.)

Once Ms. Miller was in jail, The Times’ original lawyers, Mr. Freeman and Mr. Abrams, found themselves at odds with Robert Bennett, the Washington lawyer who represented Bill Clinton against Paula Jones, and who had been added to the team at Ms. Miller’s behest.

Mr. Freeman and Mr. Abrams advocated having Ms. Miller stay in jail through Oct. 28, when the grand jury is set to expire. Mr. Bennett sought to reopen negotiations to get her out.

“Arthur’s position on this and other matters was precisely what I thought it should be,” Mr. Abrams said: “to permit Judy to make decisions that affected her personal freedom, and to support her in whatever decisions she reached.”

In the end, Ms. Miller chose to follow Mr. Bennett’s advice and negotiate. There was resistance on The Times’ end from Mr. Freeman and Mr. Abrams, said a source familiar with the matter, because they worried about the perception that Ms. Miller was abandoning her principle.

“I think it took [Mr. Bennett] that long to convince the Times lawyers to look at this waiver issue head-on,” said a lawyer familiar with the case who is a Bennett ally. “I know he’s not on good terms with the Times management.”

Eventually, Mr. Bennett ended up trying to stand between Times readers and Ms. Miller’s story. “I was very much opposed, for legal reasons and other reasons, for Judy to write in the paper about her grand-jury testimony,” Mr. Bennett said. “But she was under a lot of pressure from the newspaper that required her to do it as an employee of The New York Times.”

So Mr. Sulzberger’s crusade fizzled. Just a year ago, he wrote with Russell Lewis on The Times’ Op-Ed page that the Miller case struck at the heart of the press’ ability “to help hold government accountable to its citizens.” Ms. Miller’s plight, the two wrote, proved the need for a federal shield law “to give meaning to the guarantees of the First Amendment.”

Does Mr. Sulzberger plan to revisit the story in print? “At this time,” a Times spokesperson wrote, “he’s not planning on writing another article.”

New York Times pundit standings, Oct. 18-24, 2005

1. Thomas L. Friedman, score 8.0 [rank last week: 4th]

2. Frank Rich, 5.0 [2nd]

3. Maureen Dowd, 3.5 [1st]

4. (tie) David Brooks, 0.0 [3rd]

Bob Herbert, 0.0 [tie—5th]

Nicholas D. Kristof, 0.0 [tie—5th]

John Tierney, 0.0 [tie—5th]

The most dramatic Op-Ed column of the TimesSelect Era—Maureen Dowd’s “I’ve always liked Judy Miller” offering—inspired three Andrea Peyser columns in a row. But it only made No. 19 on the week’s Most E-Mailed list, behind free-content pieces about tourist attractions in Boone, N.C., and revisions to the GRE. If the people won’t even pay to see a public fragging, what exactly are they going to pay for?

—T.S.

"It's easier than doing the Supreme Court," Mr. Abrams said, flashing a grin so wide that his lip line curled at its edges into a grimace.

Minutes later, there he was-nuzzling up to Mr. Stewart from the couch arm. A couple of clever lines were all he needed to get the audience going now-even if the topics were as dry as the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts. It "made it a crime to say things that you routinely say-like anything bad about the President of the United States," he told Mr. Stewart, pausing conspiratorially for emphasis and drawing that grin up again. "Or the Congress." It was enough to charm the crowd.

Twice during the interview, Mr. Stewart tipped the red, white and blue cover of Mr. Abrams' new book, Speaking Freely, the lawyer's first, to the cameras.

So why didn't Mr. Abrams bring up the case that could have him making another appearance before the Supreme Court, for what would be the 15th time? For about a year now, when not putting the finishing touches on his book, he's been defending Time magazine White House correspondent Matthew Cooper and Times woman Judith Miller against a charge of contempt in a federal grand-jury investigation. The government wants to know who leaked the name of C.I.A. operative Valerie Plame to the press, and Mr. Cooper and Ms. Miller aren't telling.

After having his arguments stuffed twice in federal courts in Washington, D.C., Mr. Abrams will file a petition in the next two weeks asking the Supreme Court to review this case.

Since writing his book, which reflects on his 40-plus-year career, he's been thinking in what he called "global-personal terms." His latest case-which pits the White House against media titans Time Inc. and The New York Times-is the next chapter.

That very day, the legal team representing the two reporters made a major announcement: Mr. Cooper and Time would be splitting off from Mr. Abrams, Ms. Miller and The Times and using a different lawyer. A very different lawyer: Theodore Olson, the former Solicitor General and member of the Bush faithful, who won the President his office by arguing Bush v. Gore before the high court (one of his 41 Supreme Court appearances).

There are plenty of strategic reasons for the move. Mr. Olson's conservative bent will surely appeal to the court. A man whose wife, the lawyer and conservative TV commentator Barbara Olson, was killed on the flight that crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. Olson has hardly favored restrictions on the right of the justice system to ferret out security risks.

Still, it was impossible not to wonder whether Mr. Olson's new clients hadn't lost confidence in the First Amendment's chief Rottweiler, Mr. Abrams.

Earlier in the night, in the backstage room that The Daily Show had reserved for him, Mr. Abrams, 68, flicked on MSNBC to catch his 38-year-old son Dan's show, The Abrams Report, as he does every night. His son-who shares his father's lively, deep-set eyes and signature smile-respectfully anchored a segment discussing the tabloid fodder of the night: the news that Michael Jackson's ex-wife was going to testify against him.

"I think I have my own problems right now," Mr. Abrams said.

Bedrock Protections?

The "Matt and Judy" case, as Mr. Abrams calls it, has its roots in a July 6, 2003, Op-Ed published in The Times by retired Ambassador Joseph Wilson IV, in which he argued that the administration relied on faulty intelligence when it claimed that Saddam Hussein tried to buy uranium ore in Niger. That claim by the government was an important part of the case the Bush administration built for the war in Iraq.

Eight days later, conservative columnist Robert Novak published a report in which "two senior administration officials" attempted to discredit Mr. Wilson's findings. The blind quotes suggested that Mr. Wilson had gotten the assignment because of a special connection he had with the ever-disgruntled C.I.A.: His wife, Valerie Plame, Mr. Novak wrote, was "an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction."

The column undermined Mr. Wilson's credibility, since the C.I.A. was known to be contemptuous of the administration's arguments for the Iraq war. But close watchers of the insiders' game that has come to be known as the Plame affair read the entire drama differently. The column had destroyed Ms. Plame's career as an agent. Was it retribution against Mr. Wilson for having written the Times Op-Ed piece in the first place?

Then Time magazine posted an online article titled "A War on Wilson?", in which it mentioned-albeit somewhat skeptically-that "some government officials have noted to Time in interviews (as well as to syndicated columnist Robert Novak) that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, is a CIA official who monitors the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction."

Two months later, citing the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act, the Justice Department announced that it was pursuing a criminal investigation into who had leaked the name of Ms. Plame. That winter, Patrick Fitzgerald, the Chicago U.S. Attorney who was appointed special prosecutor in the matter by the Justice Department, convened a grand jury in Washington, D.C. That spring, he began subpoenaing reporters who he believed could provide evidence.

For Mr. Abrams, that's when it began. He received a call in his financial-district office from Robin Bierstedt, deputy general counsel at Time Inc., who told him that Mr. Fitzgerald was planning to subpoena Mr. Cooper.

"I flew out to Chicago and made an appointment to meet with Pat Fitzgerald, to urge him not to go down this road," Mr. Abrams recalled over lunch at an airy Upper East Side brasserie. "And he told me that he thought about it very seriously, but that he wouldn't be going down it if he wasn't prepared to go to the end of the road."

Last summer, word slowly leaked out that at least three of the other four reporters who had information sought by the prosecutor had accommodated him to varying degrees. The fourth, Mr. Novak-the writer who first published Ms. Plame's name-refuses to say whether he has been subpoenaed.

But Walter Pincus and Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post, and Tim Russert of NBC News, seem to have gotten the all-clear.

Journalists at places like The Washington Post are not known to throw source anonymity aside lightly. Mr. Abrams' and The Times' persistence in defending Ms. Miller, and brooking no compromise, has led some to wonder whether The Times is choosing the wrong battle.

"I think the reality is that, just as they don't know what deals Judy made, I don't know what their arrangements were, and I'm reluctant to start even suggesting that other journalists threw in the towel. I did say, and do mean, that we would be in a stronger position if we had other journalists aligned with us and in the same position at the same time. Yet it does irritate me when I sometimes hear it said that other journalists are asking, 'Why don't we put this behind us? Why don't we work something out?' There are circumstances in which things can't be worked out, and that's been the reality here," Mr. Abrams said.

Mr. Abrams was retained by The Times to defend one of the few remaining targets of the grand-jury investigation. Ms. Miller, like Mr. Cooper, had been subpoenaed-but unlike him, she had never even written about what she'd learned. So the special prosecutor wanted to know what she'd gathered in her reporting.

In October, Judge Thomas Hogan held Ms. Miller-and then, a week later, Mr. Cooper-in contempt of court. The sentence: up to 18 months (the length of the grand-jury term) in federal prison.

"This Court need not search far to find a case which directly addresses the issues currently before it," Judge Hogan wrote in the memorandum opinion that held Mr. Russert and Mr. Cooper in contempt initially. "In Branzburg v. Hayes, the United States Supreme Court squarely addressed the application of a reporter's privilege in the context of a grand jury …. The facts of this case fall entirely within that core-a reporter called to testify before a grand jury regarding confidential information enjoys no First Amendment protection …. The Branzburg opinion's holding that there is no First Amendment or common law reporters' privilege in the grand jury context plainly encompasses journalists asked to reveal confidential sources and information."

Mr. Abrams consolidated their cases and appealed them to the Court of Appeals for D.C. A three-judge panel unanimously upheld the ruling, citing again the 1972 ruling in Branzburg v. Hayes and determining that Ms. Miller and Mr. Cooper-despite the promises they may have made to sources to maintain their confidentiality-were legally bound to cooperate with the grand jury. Last week, the full panel of the court declined to reconsider the decision.

On May 10, two petitions for a writ of certiorari (i.e., a decision by the Supreme Court to hear the case) will be filed, giving the issue an extra 30 pages of airtime-one by Mr. Olson's colleagues (he is prevented from putting his name on any briefs against the government until July 2005, the one-year anniversary of his departure from the Solicitor General's post), and the other by Mr. Abrams. This wasn't how it was supposed to be, but Mr. Abrams says it's for the best.

"He's a lawyer of enormous skill, with a lot of arguments in the Supreme Court on subjects other than the First Amendment, and he has a great deal of credibility with the court. Second, it's helpful to have another overview of the subject presented to the court, even if we agree on just about everything," Mr. Abrams said backstage before the Stewart show.

Mr. Olson was traveling and unavailable for comment on taking the case, but his assistant, Helen Voss, called to tell The Observer that Mr. Olson "has the utmost respect for Floyd."

The initial statement issued by Time Inc. general counsel John Redpath said that they have been "superbly represented by America's premier First Amendment expert, Floyd Abrams," adding, "But given the fact that Floyd is also representing Judy Miller of the New York Times in this matter, we thought it would be helpful to add a second voice to the team." In a second, revised statement sent later in the day, the clause mentioning Ms. Miller was removed, suggesting that Time didn't want to call attention to any disagreements over how the individual cases had been handled.

There have always been differences between the cases of Ms. Miller and Mr. Cooper. Mr. Cooper was one of the writers of Time's online article; he also cooperated briefly with the prosecutor-an effort which didn't seem to go as planned, since he was asked to return for more questioning (at which point he refused and was held in contempt).

But there have been bigger differences between their cases and, say, the recent case of The Washington Post. Mr. Pincus and Mr. Kessler, the two Post reporters who were asked to testify, found ways to accommodate the prosecutor's requests.

For instance, Mr. Pincus confirmed the content of his conversation without ever having to tell the prosecutor the source's name, while Mr. Kessler confirmed that he hadn't discussed Ms. Plame or Mr. Wilson with Lewis (Scooter) Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff.

Sources said the question was whether this case was the right one to expand the definition of those freedoms under Branzburg. And given this conservative court, wasn't it possible that a test of Branzburg could lead to more-not fewer-restrictions on the freedom of the press?

"You would have preferred a case like Watergate to be the one where the issue would be raised," conceded Laura Handman, a prominent First Amendment lawyer. "But the D.C. circuit's decision in the Miller-Cooper case impacts the use of confidential sources in all contexts."

And Ms. Miller is hardly the most fitting poster child for First Amendment rights. Her own reporting has been dogged by her admission that she allowed Army personnel to vet at least one piece she wrote while "embedded" in Iraq in exchange for a scoop. Reporters and press critics quickly came to view Mr. Abrams' cause as the resurrection of Ms. Miller, not the freedom of the press.

"My view, like Floyd's, is that you can't be a little bit pregnant," Ms. Miller said when asked about the case. "I took the position that we just can't cooperate with these kinds of inquiries …. In these times, these difficult times, we need that kind of protection. I don't think that journalists are an arm of law enforcement."

But there's a certain nervousness on the part of those who have been watching Mr. Abrams in his current Sisyphean task.

"He has dedicated his career to developing protections of the press, this being one of them-a very critical one," Ms. Handman said. "This is one of the bedrock protections. It would be sad if it eroded with him leading the charge." She added: "I'm not saying anyone could have avoided it better than he, and I think it will be preserved in other contexts, like civil suits."

"I think he's handled it as well as one can handle it," said Victor Kovner, another senior statesman in the First Amendment bar. "This is a very major case … but one of a great many in his illustrious career."

Mr. Abrams received his introduction to First Amendment concerns in the late 1960's and early 1970's, as a litigation associate at Cahill, Gordon and Reindel, a firm that was making its name in First Amendment work. (The firm, where he is now the marquee partner, ranks second in the country in terms of profits per partner, reported by The American Lawyer in 2003 as an average of $2.4 million.)

Journalists for his firm's client, NBC, started receiving "subpoena after subpoena" to appear before grand juries and reveal details about their newsgathering (in Speaking Freely, he writes that between 1969 and July 1971, NBC and CBS received 122 such subpoenas).

Near the end of 1971, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case that would attempt to resolve the question whether a legal protection exists for the promise that journalists make to their sources every day-to protect their confidentiality.

The case was Branzburg, the one whose issues Mr. Abrams is trying to revive. Paul Branzburg, a young reporter for the Louisville Courier-Journal, wrote exposés about the hashish and drug trade. He was hauled before a grand jury by a district attorney and refused to name his sources for the pieces.

Mr. Abrams, on behalf of NBC, filed an amicus brief with other major news organizations, including The New York Times and the Chicago Sun-Times, seeking First Amendment protection for journalists and their confidential sources. Back then, there seemed to be more interest on the part of news organizations to get involved in the case.

"In fact, the law about whether the press has any constitutional right to gather news was nonexistent," Mr. Abrams recalled over lunch. "In that time, briefs tended to really go back to first principles, because there was no place else to look. If a lawyer can't cite cases, he has to cite something, and the thing here was a sort of cri de coeur: It can't be that a First Amendment which says 'Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press' doesn't give any protection to the very newsgathering process without which the promise of a free press is negated."

While the Supreme Court found against Paul Branzburg in a 5-4 ruling, Mr. Abrams had moved on to successfully defend The New York Times (second-seating his former Yale Law mentor, Alexander Bickel) against the administration in its decision to publish the government's secret history of the Vietnam War.

"On my thirty-fifth birthday, nine days after the Supreme Court decided the case, my first toast was to Hugo Black," Mr. Abrams writes earnestly in his new book, referring to the Supreme Court justice who wrote the majority opinion.

Playing The Fool

Over lunch at Demarchelier, on 86th and Madison, Mr. Abrams said that choosing the right case is beside the point. Cases choose people.

"This was not an effort by Judy Miller to go to court, or Matt Cooper to go to court, and say, 'We're not satisfied with what's going on in the judicial system of the United States about confidential sources,'" he said with the kindly, even temper of a law professor. "They've been hauled into court against their will, at great personal risk to themselves, and their lawyer is doing the best job he can to try to protect them."

Mr. Abrams clasped his hands in front of him, tapping his fingertips together like a metronome.

It was Erev Pesach, and he had obligingly come straight from the morning service at Park Avenue Synagogue, a Conservative (faith-wise) congregation. He looked a bit the way basketball coaches look when they don suits instead of jerseys, then spend a few years on the sidelines wearing suits like the sharp, navy blue one he wore that day: vigorous, tall, both athletic-looking and a little lumpy. His hair forms a fringe of faded gray like a bed skirt around the back of his pink pate: his wide, occasionally impish face has a little bit of Wallace Shawn about it.

When his son Dan and his daughter Ronnie were children, they would ask Mr. Abrams to sit by their beds and tell them about his cases instead of reading bedtime stories.

"We knew it would make him stay longer," said the younger Mr. Abrams. (Ronnie, 36, also caught the legal bug: She's an assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District, the acting head of the general-crimes unit of the criminal division.)

The elder Mr. Abrams and his wife of 41 years, Efrat, continue to live in the same Upper East Side co-op that they moved into in 1970, when Dan was 4 and Ronnie was 2. Dan attended Riverdale Country Day School; Ronnie, the Dalton School.

But Mr. Abrams' own childhood was not this picture of sartorial comfort. He was born in 1936, within walking distance of Yankee Stadium, to a mother who had emigrated from the outskirts of Minsk, Russia, and a father who ran a successful artificial-flower business. It was a liberal sort of circle where the only questions were whether to support the Progressive candidate for the Presidency, Henry Wallace, or the Democrat, Harry Truman. Mr. Abrams supported Truman-"at 12," he joked. A precocious student at Forest Hills High School, he graduated-after skipping a few grades-at age 15.

At Cornell, as an American government and history major, he wrote a senior thesis adopting Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter's view that the press was often a nuisance, arguing that, "Like England … America should make it criminal for the press to publish any information prior to a trial that could interfere with a defendant's right to a fair trial."

"That I would be arguing precisely the opposite in the United States Supreme Court 20 years later was unimaginable," he writes.

And what about now? Was the White House after his clients?

"I don't think the Judy Miller case is political," he said. "The reason I don't think that is that I have a lot of trust in the special prosecutor on a personal level. He's a serious guy-by all accounts, someone who would not yield to political temptation."

And indeed, Mr. Abrams is still holding an ace or two.

In February, the week after the D.C. Court of Appeals ruled that Branzburg's mandate was clear-that reporters have no right to withhold the identities of their anonymous sources from the justice system-Judge Robert Sweet of Federal District Court in Manhattan made an exception. He decided that Mr. Fitzgerald, acting in his capacity as U.S. Attorney in Chicago, couldn't subpoena the phone records of Ms. Miller and her colleague, Philip Shenon, for evidence in another grand-jury investigation. That probe sought to determine whether two Islamic charities were tipped off to impending raids by the government.

Judge Sweet concluded that there is a "qualified First Amendment privilege" which "protects reporters from compelled disclosure of their confidential sources."

Mr. Abrams will be using this to argue that the Supreme Court should weigh in on what appears to be a conflict in the federal courts.

He'll also be unfurling 31 state statutes before the Supremes, and 18 examples of decisions from state judges, which he said constitute a national consensus on protection for journalists concealing their confidential sources that should lead the Supreme Court to establish the same rule for federal courts.

Finally, he will argue that his side has yet to see the evidence in support of Mr. Fitzgerald's claim that the government has an overwhelming need for the information Ms. Miller is keeping to herself.

"Almost all the judges in the Pentagon Papers case thought bad things would happen as a result of publication-even the most liberal judges thought that. On one level, it's hard not to think it when the government tells you that. A judge with a decent sense of humility can't help but ask himself or herself, 'How can I second-guess what the Defense Department-or Homeland Security, or the C.I.A.-is telling me?' And yet, one of the great contributions of the First Amendment is that it leads to an enormous sense of skepticism, when the government does come to court, about the essentiality of the limitation on speech that the government is asking for."

"He's passionate about democracy and self-government and the ability of people to make their own decisions," said Devereux Chatillon, a former colleague. "It's sort of the core of what freedom is."

In his book, Mr. Abrams writes about some of the cases that have brought him attention: Defending Landmark Communications, owner of the Virginia Pilot, which had been convicted of a misdemeanor for publishing a true report about a confidential judicial panel; then defending NBC against a libel suit brought by Wayne Newton, ABC against anti-Communist Victor Lasky, and the Brooklyn Museum against Mayor Giuliani-and, unsuccessfully with Ken Starr, against proposed campaign-finance reforms.

"It is not uncommon for lawyers to persuade themselves of their clients' virtues," he writes in the final chapter. "Sometimes that is harmful: A lawyer who is too close to a client may be the same fool the client would be if he were representing himself. On other occasions, such advocacy is both genuine (the lawyer means it) and useful (the lawyer can speak with special zeal on behalf of the client). I think my own evolution was the latter, not self-induced, but the product of what I had learned."

It's hard to think of a practicing attorney more consistently associated with any single area of litigation than Floyd Abrams and the First Amendment. Since successfully representing The New York Times over 30 years ago in the Pentagon Papers case, he's been the go-to guy for media companies seeking either to defend free-speech principles or to avoid paying huge sums to unhappy news subjects.

In Speaking Freely, Mr. Abrams seems to have two related objectives. First, and primarily, he means to provide an engaging account of certain cases he has tried since 1971. Second, he wants to provide an explanation and justification of his philosophical transformation during this period.

When he began practicing law, Mr. Abrams' views were "greatly influenced" by Justice Felix Frankfurter, who "often treated the press more as an irresponsible and even dangerous nuisance than as an institution that could legitimately benefit society." Today, within a constitutional framework that provides many protections to the individual citizen, Mr. Abrams' views are closely aligned with those of the ACLU, which treats speech not as an important freedom but as the freedom that "should outweigh all but the most vital competing societal interests, and even then only in the narrowest of circumstances."

Mr. Abrams is quite successful at chronicling his career. It may help that I'm a bit of a trial junkie, but he paints a vivid portrait of the players, the strategies and the drama underlying a handful of well-chosen cases. Even where the trial has no significant jurisprudential import, Mr. Abrams manages to hold our interest and our sympathy. This is certainly true when investigator Jules Kroll manages to dig up a credible witness to a 20-year-old drug deal in the midst of a long-delayed libel trial initiated by a supposedly innocent Turkish businessman who had been described as a heroin trafficker in a Pulitzer Prize–winning Newsday series. It's equally true when we watch famous red-baiter Victor Lasky self-immolate on the stand in his disastrous libel suit against ABC.

Although he bends over backwards, as any good free-speech defender must, to commend those who thoughtfully articulate views different from his own, Mr. Abrams doesn't sugarcoat his opinion of the litigants, counsel or judges with whom he has tangled. Characters as diverse as Wayne Newton and Rudolph Giuliani come in for fairly devastating-and compelling-criticism. Even the much-beloved Senator John McCain is deliciously skewered as basically unfit for high public office.

Significantly less successful are Mr. Abrams' efforts to convince us that his conversion to absolutist defender of First Amendment rights is rooted in more than the tendency shared by many lawyers "to persuade themselves of their clients' virtues." A number of Mr. Abrams' own observations seem to undercut his position that this Constitutional right is worthy of some special status relative to others. For instance, he notes that much of what we take for granted as settled First Amendment law only came about as a result of Supreme Court cases decided since the 1960's. Furthermore, he grants that the framers had no very clear idea of what they meant by the broad requirement that Congress enact "no law abridging the freedom of speech or of the press." Mr. Abrams points out that in the early days of the republic, both Congress and the courts assumed they had the power to restrict all sorts of speech that today would be protected. None of this seems to support a Constitutional jurisprudence that puts the First Amendment first not only chronologically but in all other respects as well.

Giving Mr. Abrams the benefit of the doubt, one might interpret his argument as being based on policy considerations rather than constitutional law. He ends his book with some observations comparing speech protections in the U.S. to those of other democracies such as Canada, England, France, Germany and Israel. If the cases discussed here had been brought in those other nations, Mr. Abrams concedes, he might not have won any of them. This admission undercuts the so-called "slippery slope" argument that free-speech advocates trot out to justify the broadest possible scope of protection: Curtail free speech, we're told, and we'll be on a "slippery slope" to fascism. There are plenty of reasons why I'm happy not to be Canadian, but this isn't one of them.

Mr. Abrams makes the comparison with other democratic nations in order to highlight the single arena in which the U.S. seems to offer less speech protection: journalists seeking to protect confidential sources. This issue is of particular interest to Mr. Abrams because he's currently representing The New York Times' Judith Miller and Time's Matt Cooper, who face possible jail time for failing to reveal their sources in connection with an investigation into the "outing" of undercover C.I.A. agent Valerie Plame. Mr. Abrams cites a European Court of Human Rights ruling for the proposition that protecting sources is important-otherwise they might be "deterred from assisting the press in informing the public on matters of the public interest."

The ruling cited by Mr. Abrams won't be of much help to his clients. The European Court also noted that revealing sources could be "justified by an overriding requirement in the public interest." In the Valerie Plame case, the reporters were not uncovering government wrongdoing-the leak itself was the wrongdoing. Congress passed a law that made it illegal to disclose the names of undercover agents. Enforcing that law sounds to me like a "requirement in the public interest."

If Congress had wanted to make exceptions, it certainly could have-but any loophole that allowed this situation would have gutted the law. And Congress never provided a blanket exemption shielding reporters from the obligation we all share to assist in grand-jury investigations. If these conditions "deter" someone from illegally disclosing the name of an undercover agent to a reporter, there's no great loss to society. Mr. Abrams position here is weak-in fact, it was sweepingly rejected by a Feb. 15 federal appeals court decision. Even the avowed "First Amendment extremists" at Slate.com have urged Ms. Miller and Mr. Cooper to fire Mr. Abrams and hire instead someone who will quietly cut a deal with the prosecutors.

Floyd Abrams is a litigator, not a politician, historian or philosopher. And if his book is any indication, he's remarkably effective: The best litigators are great storytellers, and the stories this litigator tells here are intrinsically interesting and provide the framework for understanding how the U.S. came to have the broadest free-speech protections of any democracy in the world. And yet one closes the book with the sense that it easily could have turned out differently-and that the story is not quite over. How the press and others use our unprecedented level of freedom in the future will undoubtedly determine how the courts and Congress change the contours of what we're at liberty to say.

Jonathan A. Knee is a senior managing director at Evercore Partners and the director of the media program at Columbia Business School.

Ms. Miller—the redoubtable, doubtable New York Times scoop artist—was on the phone Monday afternoon, giving an interview on her way to get an interview. The quick-change routine is well practiced by now: from reporter to news object and back again.

But even Ms. Miller sounded a bit breathless from her latest adventures. On Oct. 7, federal judge Thomas Hogan had found her in contempt of court for refusing to discuss her confidential sources and ordered her to jail for up to 18 months—then freed her on bond pending an appeal. The next morning, it was front-page news in her own paper; two days after that, Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and chief executive Russell Lewis commandeered the top of the Sunday Op-Ed page for a booming defense of Ms. Miller and, in the bargain, the freedom of the press.

"Her crime was doing her job as the founders of this nation intended," they wrote.

In the middle of it all, on Saturday, Ms. Miller had a page-one piece of her own, a joint byline with Eric Lipton on an article about the Iraqi oil-for-food program. Her aim, Ms. Miller said, had been to "try and get a front-page story in my paper, to show people that I’m going to continue writing."

The prospect of martyrdom seemed to have left Ms. Miller in high spirits, if not exactly glad ones; her end of the conversation was peppered with incredulous laughter. "I’ve been kind of amazed at the outpouring of support from other journalists," she said.

Ms. Miller is in the varied collection of reporters entangled with the grand jury investigating who leaked of the identity of C.I.A. agent Valerie Plame to the press. The leaked information was published not by Ms. Miller, but by conservative columnist Robert Novak in the Chicago Sun-Times, as the Bush administration attempted to (depending on who’s telling the story) rebut, intimidate or smear Ms. Plame’s husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, who’d criticized the administration’s claims about Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions.

Till now, the W.M.D. question has done nothing to burnish Ms. Miller’s journalistic credentials. On October 3, The Times ran yet another piece revising its prewar coverage of Iraq’s mass-destructive capabilities. Following the lead of The Washington Post —which had broken the same news 14 months earlier— The Times meticulously demonstrated how the Bush administration had tilted evidence so that captured aluminum tubes, meant as Iraqi artillery rocket parts, could be passed off as nuclear centrifuge components.

And if The Times was more than a year late reacting to The Post, it was more than two years late reacting to itself. Far down, the Oct. 3 piece offered an implicit confession of institutional and reportorial failure: "[O]n Sept. 8 [2002], the lead article on Page 1 of The New York Times gave the first detailed account of the aluminum tubes. The article cited unidentified senior administration officials who insisted that the dimensions, specifications and numbers of tubes sought showed that they were intended for a nuclear weapons program …. The article gave no hint of a debate over the tubes."

The Times didn’t name the authors of the original piece, but they were Ms. Miller and Michael R. Gordon.

Yet by Monday, there was no more thought of the suspicious tubes—nor MET Team Alpha, the baseball-cap-wearing mystery scientist, or the rest of Ms. Miller’s dubious or anonymous portfolio. Ms. Miller was no longer the Belle of Babylon, the volunteer page of the Iraqi National Congress, Miss Bad Intelligence Rising herself. She was Judy again.

That was how the op-ed from Mr. Sulzberger, her old colleague at the Washington bureau, referred to her: "Judy Miller"—not "Judith." Sending Judy Miller to jail, Mr. Sulzberger and Mr. Lewis argued, will threaten the press’ "ability to gather and receive information in confidence from those who would face reprisals from bringing important information about our government into the light of day."

Ms. Miller said she was heartened by the brass’ public declaration of solidarity. "It’s less lonely," she said, "but it makes me wonder what happens when this happens to someone who doesn’t have the power and the influence and the money of The New York Times behind them."

Had something like this happened earlier in her career, when she wrote for the less formidable likes of The Progressive magazine, Ms. Miller said, "a lawsuit would have turned me towards being a real-estate broker." ("Of course, I would have been richer," she added.)

Even with the stand-up-for-the-little-man rhetoric, though, there is a certain Nazis-marching-through-Skokie tone to the present case. Ms. Miller is not going to the mat for some helpless whistleblower; she’s defending the right of high officials to try to anonymously sic The New York Times on a subordinate who bucked them. Mr. Wilson signed his own name to his criticisms, and it was the confidential sources who allegedly sought reprisal.

"For some group of people, that would be called whistleblowing," Mr. Sulzberger said on the phone Tuesday evening—for instance, he said, people who thought Mr. Wilson’s complaints about the administration (aired in a Times op-ed) hadn’t shared all the relevant facts.

"I’m not suggesting that you have to agree every time with whether that person should have given out that information," Mr. Sulzberger said.

Floyd Abrams, Ms. Miller’s lawyer, offered a similar view. "The law can’t distinguish between good leaks and bad," Mr. Abrams said. Mr. Abrams is also representing Time magazine’s Matt Cooper, who will be facing Judge Hogan today in his own contempt hearing in the Plame affair. Mr. Cooper appears almost certain to share Ms. Miller’s fate, in which case Mr. Abrams said their appeals will be lumped together in the Court of Appeals. If they lose, both could be in jail by Thanksgiving.

It could make a reality-TV show, Ms. Miller suggested brightly: "Matt and me and Martha."

Unlike imprisoned journalist Ms. Stewart, neither Ms. Miller nor Mr. Cooper has been convicted of anything. Their confinement is meant to coerce them into telling the grand jury about their sources. So they would be held till the grand jury is finished—or 18 months, whichever comes first, Mr. Abrams said.

"I’ve only had one other client who was sent away," Mr. Abrams said. That was The Times ’ Myron Farber, jailed for refusing to provide evidence during a New Jersey murder trial in 1978 and held till the trial was over. "He was there for 40 days," Mr. Abrams said. "I used to bring him donuts on Sundays."

Now he may see two more clients behind bars—despite the reporters’ markedly different approaches to handling the Plame leak. Mr. Cooper, presented with the top-down whistleblowing, wrote an article denouncing the leakers. "I wrote the first piece saying that there was an effort to smear Joe Wilson," Mr. Cooper said. "I shouldn’t have to go to jail for that. I shouldn’t have to go to jail for doing my job."

But Ms. Miller can top that: She never wrote anything about Ms. Plame at all.

"Judy Miller being threatened with jail for having gotten information for a story she never wrote and we never ran is illogical to me, and dangerous," Mr. Sulzberger said.

Would Times editors who might have known of Ms. Miller’s reporting also be eligible for a subpoena? Mr. Sulzberger said he didn’t know whether her work had even entered the editorial process, and didn’t care to explore the implications. "I think one person in jail is enough for The New York Times," he said.

And Ms. Miller said that the differences in individual reporters’ actions are beside the point. "The last thing I want to do is start dividing journalists," she said. " … This is not the time to start saying, ‘Why me and not him?’"

Ms. Miller did, however, note one division between herself and other subpoenaed journalists. Some reporters, including Mr. Cooper, agreed to testify about one particular source, Vice Presidential chief of staff Lewis (Scooter) Libby, after Mr. Libby waived his confidentiality agreement with them.

Despite Mr. Libby’s apparent enthusiasm to put his remarks on the record, Ms. Miller described the waivers as a "pernicious" concept. "I do not consider these waivers voluntary," she said.

Mr. Sulzberger and Ms. Miller both argued that the case shows the need for a federal shield law, establishing legal protection for reporter-source agreements akin to that for lawyers and clients, or priests and parishioners.

"It’s not about Judy Miller," Mr. Sulzberger said. "It’s bigger than that."

"This is really all about the readers," Ms. Miller said. "This is all about the public—the public’s right to know."

Even so, a lot of it is about Judy Miller. "Keep those cards and letters coming," Ms. Miller said.

And while the legal encroachment on anonymous sources may threaten one of Ms. Miller’s favorite reporting tools, it hasn’t cut into her ability to report. "Quite the opposite," she said. The current case, she said, proves her commitment to her methods: "I’m willing to go to jail to protect my sources," she said.

It also gives her a rebuttal to any "snotty" Millerologists, who’ve tried tracking the way her bylines seem to rise and fall in frequency along with the tide of W.M.D.-themed editors’ notes and follow-up stories.

"For all those people who wonder what happened to Judy Miller," Ms. Miller said, "what happened to Judy Miller was she got involved in something called the American legal process."

"Dear Internet," blogger The Minor Fall, The Major Lift wrote last month, " … [I]n all likelihood, this is goodbye." A friend, the posting explained, had taken the blogger aside and "gently informed us that we should quit blogging, since our heart seemed no longer to be in it and it was "painful to watch."

This coming Sunday, after years of pseudonymously mocking the major media, the writer formerly known as TMFTML makes his New York Times debut under his own name. The new byline is Alex Balk. The piece is a guest spot in the Arts & Leisure section’s "Playlist" column, following such previous celebrity contributors as Dave Grohl, Stephin Merritt and Danger Mouse.

"I asked him to do it and he did it," said Ariel Kaminer, the editor at Arts & Leisure responsible for Mr. Balk’s crossover.

That’s not all Ms. Kaminer asked, Mr. Balk said. She was the one who told him to quit the blog, too. "It had sort of run its course," he said. Ms. Kaminer’s intervention, he said, was "the final nail."

"I’d like to think I’m doing my level best to drain the blogosphere of all its best talent," Ms. Kaminer said, citing kicked-upstairs Gawker ex-scribe Choire Sicha as another freelance ornament to the Webified A&L section.

Mr. Balk said he’s hoping his ex-peers in the blog world will pounce on his Times work. "I’d be a little hypocritical not to," he said. But he added that he has new sympathy for print writers, having been through the editing process himself: "You realize how much originality is drained out."

And Mr. Balk throws a bone to his old medium by including, in his list of recommended CD’s and DVD’s, the mp3 blog Fluxblog.

Is that a defensive gesture, out of guilt at selling out? Not at Times pay rates, Mr. Balk said. "If I were selling out, I would have gone for something much better," he said. "Like New York magazine. I really want to sell out to them."

Tuesday was a bad day for the pipes in Manhattan media infrastructure. From midday on, the majority of the restrooms at The New York Times were out of order. Male Times employees were allowed to use the urinals, but folks with flushing-related business at West 43rd Street had to leave the premises. Some took advantage of the facilities at the Westin.

Off the Record presents that information as a public service, because Gawker was sidelined from roughly 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., thanks to what Gawker empire chief Nick Denton called "a perfect storm of technical problems" in an instant-messenger interview.

How The Times survived a day cut off from the two leading forms of writerly procrastination was unclear at press time.

This week, New York magazine presented the first of its major renovation projects under editor Adam Moss: a wildly expanded service section, "The Strategist." In a pair of lengthy explanatory messages—one on the cover—the magazine promotes it as a wide-ranging, 22-page smorgasbord of things to buy and do. "Every New Yorker should be able to find something in it they can use and afford," the inside editors’ note explains.

If they can make it through, that is. "The Strategist" is handsome, but 22 pages is an awfully long shopping list—even if you subtract the space New York filled by moving the sex column in among the goods and services. Amy Sohn’s recommodified vagina aside, what can readers take away from it all? In the name of service journalism, Off the Record presents the summarized "Strategist":

Fur-bearing species and their post-mortem habitats:

Mink ( Mustela vison)—trim on alligator slingbacks at Judith Lieber

Raccoon ( Procyon lotor)—trim on Andrew Mark coat

Rabbit ( Oryctolagus cuniculus)—Alexander McQueen coat

Vintages and prices of Chateau d’Yquem discussed:

1923, $2,013.75 per bottle

1983, $100 per glass (includes dessert)

Average price of featured parkas:

Non-waterproof and/or uncomfortable: $427.75

Waterproof,comfortable: $1,454.20

Some things between $300 and $400, in order of ascending price:

Top-of-the-line Joan Vass linen shirt ($300)

Bottom-of-the-line Bennett Liberty copper-and-leather bowl ($300)

Trip to Isiah Thomas’ hairdresser ($350)

Sodium tetradecyl sulfate injections to treat spider veins (initial session) ($375)

Double room at On the Ave Hotel ($375)

Beauty day at Bergdorf Goodman ($393)

Bottom-of-the-line Vita-Mix 5000 blender ($399)

That righteous feeling was only intensified by the appearance of Senator Mitch McConnell, former bagman for the Senate Republican campaign committee and chief opponent of the McCain-Feingold bill, announcing his plans to restore the corrupt status quo in court. At his side stood Kenneth W. Starr, the former independent counsel whose true vocation-which he never set aside during his years of partisan prosecution-is defending the sellers of tobacco products and lethally flawed automobiles.

So there was a fine pair of corporate advocates, on their way to the discredited Supreme Court to uphold special interests against the popular will. A perfect tableau of conservative power in action-except for that other guy standing next to Messrs. Starr and McConnell, whose name happens to be Floyd Abrams.

Unlike many opponents of the McCain-Feingold reforms, Mr. Abrams must be taken seriously as a person of principle. His advocacy of press freedom in the Pentagon Papers case won him an honored place in history. Although he is no longer as active in politics as he once was, his sympathies have always been on the liberal left. And in this case, he is seeking to thwart the highest editorial priority of his best-known client, The New York Times.

While he won't comment on The Times or Mr. McConnell, Mr. Abrams is more than willing to explain why he said yes when the Republican Senator called to ask for his help. The McConnell appeal forced him to confront his own increasing discomfort with a bill that, to him, represents an intolerable violation of free speech by banning "issue ads" 60 days before a general election. This provision is intended to cover the gaping loophole in existing law, which permits special interests to fund television campaigns for or against particular candidates, so long as those ads don't expressly urge a particular vote.

"In trying to plug the loopholes, what the Congress has done is to attack speech itself. Speech is not a loophole," says Mr. Abrams. As written, the bill "not only raises serious First Amendment issues, but in many respects insuperable First Amendment problems, when the government limits speech about elections. I find that to be particularly so with respect to limitations on so-called issue advertising. The core First Amendment principle is that when people speak out on public affairs, the government has no power to limit them."

He departs somewhat from his Republican allies on the question of soft money, opposing the flat ban but not some limitation on amounts. As he suggests, many soft-money contributors have no corrupt motivation, while some hard-money donors, whose influence will be enhanced by McCain-Feingold, are clearly seeking favors from government.

"It may just be that we can't deal with this problem as much as we might like to," Mr. Abrams warns. "The First Amendment has that effect sometimes, of preventing us from solving some problems the way we might like to …. We ought to have much more public disclosure, instant public disclosure of money that is contributed," he adds. "I also think that if there's a real concern about genuine corruption, as opposed to the appearance of corruption, we ought to take a harder look to see if politicians are bought. Maybe we ought to expand the definition of what's corrupt. But that's an issue for the criminal law."

Still, Mr. Abrams isn't insensitive to the impact of inequalities of wealth and power. And the solution he advocates would be, for his conservative comrades, a far worse nightmare than the half-measures he is helping them to overturn. He believes the best way to achieve electoral equity without violating freedom is public financing.

While Congress is a long way from passing any such profound reform, the McCain-Feingold bill does mandate the U.S. Comptroller General to examine the "clean money/clean election" campaigns of Arizona and Maine-the first states to implement serious public financing-and report on their efficacy to Congress next year.

What that study will reveal, if performed rigorously, is that public financing (combined with limits on private donations) can reduce politicians' dependence on special interests, encourage citizen participation in elections and improve the competitiveness of non-incumbents-all at nominal expense to taxpayers.

Opponents of McCain-Feingold gleefully predict that those "soft" millions will infiltrate the system again as "hard" millions. If they're right, the only effective response will be to match the special interests dollar for dollar with public funds. According to Mr. Abrams, "there is no constitutional problem with that."