Steve Shiffrin
by Michael C. Dorf My dear friend and colleague Steve Shiffrin has passed away. Steve was a towering figure in First Amendment law, but he was so much more than that. He was a profoundly moral but never moralistic person. I apologize for what will be a somewhat disjointed and rambling remembrance. Steve contained multitudes. Steve was a values pluralist and a rules skeptic. He did not think that the First Amendment could be reduced to a single value or encapsulated in formal rules. Nonetheless, his signature scholarly achievement--the bumper sticker or elevator pitch version of his oeuvre--can be summed up in a single word: dissent . Steve's books and articles made a powerful argument that the most important (though not the only) purpose of free speech and freedom of the press in a democratic society is to shield dissenters. Like Brandeis said (in his Whitney concurrence) about the framers' supposed view of liberty, Steve "valued [dissent] both as an end and as a means....