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594 College & Research Libraries 

deal with it, remains a challenge. If trust 
is indeed the basis of academic life, rou­
tine mistrust of researchers and their writ­
ten findings would cast a pall over that 
life. Nevertheless, some skepticism is 
healthy. After all, how do you know the 
book I just reviewed even exists?—William 
M. Hannay, Schiff Hardin & Waite, Chicago. 

Sableman, Mark. More Speech, Not Less: 
Communications Law in the Information 
Age. Foreword by Paul Simon. 
Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. 
Pr., 1997. 277p. $49.95, cloth, alk. pa­
per (ISBN 0809320711); $19.95, paper 
(ISBN 0809321351). LC 96-53449. 

Mark Sableman is an attorney who prac­
tices communications law and comments 
regularly on the field in the St. Louis Jour­
nalism Review and in legal professional 
publications. In More Speech, Not Less, his 
great knowledge of and concern for First 
Amendment issues affecting the media 
are apparent. As the title implies, in the 
ongoing debate over limiting speech with 
harmful results, Sableman is a strong pro­
ponent of speech and press that is as free 
as possible. He believes that we, the 
American public, should take greater re­
sponsibility for our role in our 
democracy’s legal process. Sableman en­
courages us to learn about the issues, to 
think critically about them, and to use our 
understanding to influence the direction 
of the law. Unfortunately—and to a fussy 
reference librarian, annoyingly—the au­
thor has not made it easy for a reader to 
use his work to that end. 

Reference librarians like books to be 
useful. This book lacks standard tools a 
book needs to be useful to a reader. First, 
there is no index. This noted, the table of 
contents does list the broad subheadings 
in each chapter and would serve to direct 
a reader to the general area where a topic 
is discussed. Next, unlike most law books, 

November 1998 

it has no table of cases to help a reader 
find each mention of a particular court 
decision. Finally, the notes are difficult to 
use. They are printed at the end of the 
book, grouped by chapter and then by topi­
cal headings within a range of pages. There 
are no footnote numbers in the text identi­
fying where a reader might find a case ci­
tation or other supporting sources. 

These flaws would be more forgivable 
if the book read well as a piece. In More 
Speech, Sableman has revised and orga­
nized many articles he originally wrote 
for media and legal professionals. Now 
intended to be a guide for interested citi­
zens, the book suffers from insufficient 
editing, for both style and content. At 
times the language is ponderously legal 
and at other times overly simplistic. The 
writing is often murky, in places almost a 
stream of ruminations. For emphasis, 
Sableman relies too often on italics rather 
than clear prose. More disciplined edit­
ing would have prevented the disjoint­
edness and repetition caused by merging 
various pieces on similar topics. 

The media bring the law into our lives 
in a way previously unimaginable. More 
and more frequently, the law we learn via 
the media in fact involves the media. 
Sableman is a keen observer of the scene 
and provides legal principles and analy­
sis on topics such as censorship and prior 
restraint; news gathering; confidentiality 
and sources; libel; privacy; copyright and 
protection of ideas; advertising; broad­
casting; fair trial and free press; the busi­
ness and education of the press; and the 
Internet and electronic information. His 
mission of alerting Americans to the 
threats to our freedoms and involving us 
in the law-making process is laudable and 
worthwhile. It is too bad that a book sub­
titled Communications in the Information 
Age does not communicate better.—Janet 
C. Katz, Harvard Law School.