Does (or should) the newsman/source relationship have the same legal privileges as the attorney/client or priest/penitent relationship? Mr. Abrams says yes, and we're off on a high-energy exchange on legal history, theory, and practice. WFB: "That's sort of a revolutionary accretion, and yet, in asserting that point, you tend to do so as an exegete of the Constitution rather than as somebody who wants to amend it." FA: "Well, I do, and for this reason. It seems to me that most of the privileges we have--attorney/client at least, doctor/patient for sure--do not have constitutional roots at all.... I can't go back to the Framers of the Constitution and say--" WFB: "Or rooted in the common law?" FA: "To the common law, certainly not. The common law is almost the antithesis of the

First Amendment... The common law, as [Justice Hugo] Black said, is what we had a revolution to get away from. ..." WAR: "Since they [the journalists] do the reporting in this country, I can forgive anybody who thinks that they had had these rights for two hundred years, and that the Supreme Court and other courts fell upon them with berserk fury in the early 1970s and began taking them away."