From the Archives: Legal scholar Richard Epstein discusses new book ‘Design for Liberty’

Legal scholar Richard Epstein discusses new book ‘Design for Liberty’
February 23, 2012 4:01 PM MST

Already well-known for such works as Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain, How Progressives Rewrote the Constitution, and a widely used legal textbook on torts, New York University law professor Richard A. Epstein has just published Design for Liberty: Private Property, Public Administration, and the Rule of Law (Harvard University Press).

At a recent Cato Institute event, Professor Epstein spoke to the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner about his new book and his next project, a book about classical liberalism and constitutional law.

What is ‘Design for Liberty’?
Design for Liberty, he said, differs from his previous books in that “it’s a little bit more philosophical. It spends much more time talking directly about public administration, which I have not talked about much in previous books.”

Moreover, Epstein added, it reflects his “newfound interest in public administrative law, which is usually missing from the earlier works, and of course, it has material which I could never have covered earlier because things like the Dodd-Frank [banking] statute and the current health-care [law] are creatures of the last year or so and therefore I never spoke about them before.”

Digging further beneath the surface, Epstein pointed out that his new book contains “a fairly detailed explanation of first and second order rules, a sort of technical subject,” which involves the question of “when is it that you have to have to resort to reasonableness rules?”

That happens, he said, when “it turns out that hard-line rules don’t work and what you have to do in order to make the rule of law work is to understand that the mere fact that there’s a reasonableness in some legal system doesn’t disqualify from the rule of the law.”

“On the other hand,” he argued, “you can’t let reasonableness determinations overwhelm the whole system, so I try to develop protocols to how it is that you separate those things.”

Future project on classical liberalism
Also a columnist for the Hoover Institution's online journal, Defining Ideas, where he writes regularly as "The Libertarian," Epstein is working on his next project, which will be what he describes as “a very long book” with the working title “The Classical Liberal Constitution.”

That book, he said, is “about 90 percent done.”

In it, Epstein “takes the fundamental insights that I’ve developed over the years and basically gives a comprehensive analysis of every major constitutional area with a hell of a lot of compression, but it starts with basic theories of constitutional interpretation. It talks about the conflict between the progressive and the classical liberal visions. Those,” he said, “are things I’ve talked about before.”

Epstein’s forthcoming book “goes through systematically the judicial, the executive, and legislative branches, and then does all the various threads of individual rights, each getting a chapter.”

Unlike Design for Liberty, “which is slim,” The Classical Liberal Constitution “will be fat,” he said, with a likely publication date in late 2012 or early 2013.

“It’s been a book that’s been in the making for many years now,” Epstein explained. “It’s an effort to give a comprehensive way in which, if you take the positions that I do, various cases and various issues have to come out.”

Given Epstein’s past work, The Classical Liberal Constitution will have “some stuff on takings, but that’s not the main focus of it. It has things on freedom of religion and executive power and foreign affairs and so forth.”

Epstein concedes that his “knowledge base is not uniform across all these areas" but notes that "what makes it possible to do this project is that the Supreme Court doctrine generally tends to be comprised in a relatively few key cases.”

Consequently, “if you have a strong theory, and you pick the right cases to read, you can write the kind of book that I’m talking about.”


Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on February 23, 2012. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

From the Archives - Author Earl Dudley: from child prisoner of the Japanese to UVA law professor

Author Earl Dudley: from child prisoner of the Japanese to UVA law professor
November 21, 2010 3:51 PM MST

Having had a childhood that virtually parallels the story of Steven Spielberg’s 1987 movie, Empire of the Sun, retired UVA law professor Earl C. Dudley, Jr., begins his memoir, An Interested Life, with the Japanese bombing of the Philippines that followed the attack on Pearl Harbor.

“My mother and I were injured in the first Japanese bombing of the Philippine Islands on December 8, 1941,” he told the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner in an interview. “With my parents, I was interned in the Japanese internment camps for a little over three years in the Philippines, and we were rescued by a very dramatic operation of the 11th Airborne Division on February 23, 1945.”

Dudley was one of more than 30 local and regional writers at a “Meet the Author” book signing at the Holiday Inn in Charlottesville on November 19.


‘My parents were starving themselves’

“I was only 4 when the war was over,” Dudley explained, “so I have little independent memory of my own, but I have no memory of having had an unhappy childhood. My life was sheltered. My parents were starving themselves to feed me.”

He recalled that his father, “who was about 6 feet tall and normally weighed about 175 or 180 pounds, weighed about 120 pounds when the war was over. It was an experience for the adults that involved a tremendous amount of deprivation and unpleasantness.”

Yet, he remembers that, “as a child, I had the full attention of my parents. They were prisoners and so they focused their attention on me and they starved themselves to feed me. So I don’t think I had an unhappy childhood.”

After spending one’s earliest years in a prisoner of war camp, anything after that must pale in comparison. Yet Dudley’s life was peppered with poignant moments.

John F. Kennedy Assassination

In the early 1960s, he was working as a journalist for UPI in New York. As it happens, he was on the editor's desk when President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963.

He writes in his memoir about that day:

“The news of the assassination hit me, as it did almost everyone, like a punch to the solar plexus. But I had no time to grieve. I was running an international news wire with the biggest story in many years. Given the magnitude and pace of events, there was no time for a transition to a new editor, so I remained in the [editor’s] slot for most of the next shift as well…. I simply operated on instinct and somehow made it through the crisis without panicking.”

End of segregation

Earl Dudley

Dudley grew up in the South during the last years of enforced segregation. He was in the ninth grade in Northern Virginia, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that “separate but equal” schools were inherently unequal and, consequently, unconstitutional in the case of Brown v. Board of Education.

“I was the only kid that I ever found at my Herndon High School in 1954 whose parents told him the Supreme Court got it right,” he said.

Working for civil rights, he continued, “was always a priority of mine. I organized a demonstration at the White House in the spring of 1960 in support of the sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina, and then in later years, I did a fair amount of pro bono work for the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights in Washington.”

Studying at the University of Virginia Law School drew Dudley to Charlottesville and, after graduating, he clerked for Chief Justice Earl Warren during the Supreme Court’s 1967-68 term.

Police pat-downs

Dudley clerked during the year the Court decided Terry v. Ohio, a case that may have relevance in the current controversy about Transportation Security Administration searches at U.S. airports.

Dudley said that case was probably the best-known of that Supreme Court term, adding that he worked on it, explaining that it “dealt with the question of police pat-downs on the street, with less than probable cause to arrest. It was very controversial case at the time and has spawned a huge, whole jurisprudence of its own.”

After two decades working for various Washington law firms, Dudley returned to Charlottesville to teach.

His classes included “mostly litigation-related courses, because that’s what I had done in practice. I taught evidence, civil procedure, criminal procedure, criminal law, constitutional law, and trial advocacy.”

Dudley retired from teaching in 2008, and now enjoys quietude and travel with his wife of more than 50 years, Louise, and his family, seven decades after a tumultuous beginning to what he calls “an interested life.”

From the Archives: NRO’s Jonah Goldberg finds witch hunts and inquisitions ‘fascinating’

NRO’s Jonah Goldberg finds witch hunts and inquisitions ‘fascinating’
August 2, 2012 3:40 PM MST

In writing his new book about progressive ideology, National Review Online contributor Jonah Goldberg discovered some surprising facts about the inquisitions of the Middle Ages.

While conducting research for The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas, Goldberg “became really fascinated with the history of the inquisitions and the witch hunts in medieval Europe.”

His book, a follow-up to the 2008 best-seller Liberal Fascism, includes a lengthy, four-part chapter on the Catholic Church, a result of what he uncovered.

Until he began looking into the topic more deeply, Goldberg said, he had “had no idea how incredibly screwed up our popular understanding of what the witch hunts were about and what the inquisitions were about.”

Misunderstanding witch hunts
Goldberg spoke to the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner about his research during a break at the RightOnline conference in Las Vegas in June.

He noted that recognizing our misunderstanding of the nature of witch hunts is “not to say the witch hunts were good or the inquisitions were good, but they were far less the tragedies and travesties that the Left or the popular culture makes them out to be."

Moreover, he added, "the role the Catholic Church in these things was far different than what I had realized.”

Church as check

Jonah Goldberg

What Goldberg learned is that “the Catholic Church was a check on [the worst of] these things. The real problems were with the people themselves -- the masses, They were constantly wanting to lynch people for being witches.”

At the same time, taking advantage of the peasants’ illiteracy “local, secular aristocrats and lords were constantly pandering to the mob and the Church would come in and say, ‘Calm down everybody, let’s figure out if this person is really a witch or not.’ and often, very often, would say, ‘You guys are nuts, leave this poor woman alone.’”

Pointing to an image from popular culture, Goldberg explained that “the role of the Catholic Church we get from Monty Python, ‘Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition’, is a much more complicated story. I found that fascinating and that’s why I have such a huge chapter on the Catholic Church” in The Tyranny of Cliches.

An audio version of the complete interview with Jonah Goldberg is available on Bearing Drift radio, "The Score."

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on August 2, 2012. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

From the Archives: Georgetown philosophy professor Jason Brennan explores ethics of voting

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on July 31, 2011. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016. I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

Georgetown philosophy professor Jason Brennan explores ethics of voting

“Every day you see the same message: ‘get out the vote, get out the vote, get out the vote,’” says philosophy professor Jason Brennan.

“What if all the sentiments underlying that were just wrong?” he asks. What if they “could be shown to be wrong pretty easily?”

According to Brennan, his new book, The Ethics of Voting, shows those underlying sentiments to be, in fact, wrong.

Brennan, an assistant professor of business and philosophy at Georgetown University, summarized his book at a Cato Institute forum on July 21. After his presentation, he spoke with the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner about what motivated him to write The Ethics of Voting, how the book has been received by academics, and his new research on private behavior and the common good.

Brennan has long been interested in the topic of the ethics of voting.

Is voting special?

“Growing up,” he said, “I kept hearing, over and over again, the American civic religion [says] that voting is special, that political participation is special, that serving in the military makes you an especially good person.”

These claims were not satisfying to Brennan, he explained.

“I never found myself gripped by that,” he said. “I always wondered: What were the grounds underlying that? Why did people believe it?”

He also discovered, he continued, that “at the same time, there’s a kind of interesting philosophical question about what you should do in situations where we as a group are doing something bad but that your individual input doesn’t make a difference. That happens a lot in politics.”

Those two different but related things brought him to this topic.

Is voting rational?

He had read some of the literature about voter behavior but George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan’s 2008 book, The Myth of the Rational Voter, provided extra stimulus to write his own book.

“After reading that, I asked myself, suppose he’s right that voters are irrational. What does that mean about what they should do?”

The answer is not simple, he said. One cannot simply say, “Well, if they’re rational they shouldn’t vote, because individual votes don’t make a difference.” Instead, “it’s actually a real philosophical puzzle as to why it would even matter at all [with regard to] what an individual does and why they should vote well or not.”

Caplan’s book, Brennan said, was “like the last straw” in how it “pushed me over the edge to have to write something more about the philosophy behind” the ethics of voting.

Reaction from scholars

Brennan has received feedback from other academic philosophers, as well as from political scientists. Most of it has been positive.

Jason Brennan at Cato Institute, July 2011

The reaction he has had from philosophers, he said, “has been overwhelmingly very positive. Even if they disagree with the conclusions -- and many of them do -- what they’ve tended to like about it is that it takes on common sense. What it does is start with rather simple, plausible premises and leads to counterintuitive results. Philosophers tend to like that.”

Moreover, he added, “what a lot of philosophers have recognized, too, is that there are just a lot of unfounded assumptions about how politics works and what we should do. At the very least, I’m being a devil’s advocate in challenging” those assumptions, and that challenge makes philosophers “recognize that common sense [claims] about voting need to be justified, if they are justified” at all.

The reaction of political scientists, he said, “has largely been the same,” but faculty in political science departments who do political theory, “which is sort of philosophy but done in political science,” have a tendency “to be more skeptical because they tend to have a much more strongly emotional attachment to democracy than philosophers do.”

Private behavior as a public good

Brennan is now conducting new research on how private behavior contributes to the public good, something “that ended up being a major premise even in this book.”

He explained that “we can express civic virtue anywhere: by running a good business that helps people [and] makes them richer, by coming up with inventions, by making art, and so on.”

All these things, he said, help “promote the common good. They’re doing as much good as politics is doing, perhaps even more.”

The practical effect of this for individuals is that, “if you’re a person who is publicly spirited and you want to promote the common good, that doesn’t mean you have to get out of the market and go to the forum,” Brennan explained. “It might instead mean you should stay in the market and work there.”

Giving two prominent examples, Professor Brennan pointed out that “Thomas Edison did a lot more for us with his inventions than he ever would have done as a voter. Michelangelo did a lot more with his art than he ever would have done as a voter.”

He concluded by noting that “private civil society is really important for promoting the common good. If civic virtue is about promoting the common good, then private civil society might be the way to do it.”

Brennan wrote The Ethics of Voting while he taught at Brown University; it was published in April by Princeton University Press.

From the Archives - Author Earl Dudley: from child prisoner of the Japanese to UVA law professor

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on November 21, 2010. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016. I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

Author Earl Dudley: from child prisoner of the Japanese to UVA law professor

Having had a childhood that virtually parallels the story of Steven Spielberg’s 1987 movie, Empire of the Sun, retired UVA law professor Earl C. Dudley, Jr., begins his memoir, An Interested Life, with the Japanese bombing of the Philippines that followed the attack on Pearl Harbor.

“My mother and I were injured in the first Japanese bombing of the Philippine Islands on December 8, 1941,” he told the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner in an interview. “With my parents, I was interned in the Japanese internment camps for a little over three years in the Philippines, and we were rescued by a very dramatic operation of the 11th Airborne Division on February 23, 1945.”

Dudley was one of more than 30 local and regional writers at a “Meet the Author” book signing at the Holiday Inn in Charlottesville on November 19.


‘My parents were starving themselves’

“I was only 4 when the war was over,” Dudley explained, “so I have little independent memory of my own, but I have no memory of having had an unhappy childhood. My life was sheltered. My parents were starving themselves to feed me.”

He recalled that his father, “who was about 6 feet tall and normally weighed about 175 or 180 pounds, weighed about 120 pounds when the war was over. It was an experience for the adults that involved a tremendous amount of deprivation and unpleasantness.”

Yet, he remembers that, “as a child, I had the full attention of my parents. They were prisoners and so they focused their attention on me and they starved themselves to feed me. So I don’t think I had an unhappy childhood.”

After spending one’s earliest years in a prisoner of war camp, anything after that must pale in comparison. Yet Dudley’s life was peppered with poignant moments.

John F. Kennedy Assassination

In the early 1960s, he was working as a journalist for UPI in New York. As it happens, he was on the editor's desk when President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963.

He writes in his memoir about that day:

“The news of the assassination hit me, as it did almost everyone, like a punch to the solar plexus. But I had no time to grieve. I was running an international news wire with the biggest story in many years. Given the magnitude and pace of events, there was no time for a transition to a new editor, so I remained in the [editor’s] slot for most of the next shift as well…. I simply operated on instinct and somehow made it through the crisis without panicking.”

End of segregation
Dudley grew up in the South during the last years of enforced segregation. He was in the ninth grade in Northern Virginia, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that “separate but equal” schools were inherently unequal and, consequently, unconstitutional in the case of Brown v. Board of Education.

“I was the only kid that I ever found at my Herndon High School in 1954 whose parents told him the Supreme Court got it right,” he said.

Working for civil rights, he continued, “was always a priority of mine. I organized a demonstration at the White House in the spring of 1960 in support of the sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina, and then in later years, I did a fair amount of pro bono work for the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights in Washington.”

Studying at the University of Virginia Law School drew Dudley to Charlottesville and, after graduating, he clerked for Chief Justice Earl Warren during the Supreme Court’s 1967-68 term.

Police pat-downs
Dudley clerked during the year the Court decided Terry v. Ohio, a case that may have relevance in the current controversy about Transportation Security Administration searches at U.S. airports.

Dudley said that case was probably the best-known of that Supreme Court term, adding that he worked on it, explaining that it “dealt with the question of police pat-downs on the street, with less than probable cause to arrest. It was very controversial case at the time and has spawned a huge, whole jurisprudence of its own.”

After two decades working for various Washington law firms, Dudley returned to Charlottesville to teach.

His classes included “mostly litigation-related courses, because that’s what I had done in practice. I taught evidence, civil procedure, criminal procedure, criminal law, constitutional law, and trial advocacy.”

Dudley retired from teaching in 2008, and now enjoys quietude and travel with his wife of more than 50 years, Louise, and his family, seven decades after a tumultuous beginning to what he calls “an interested life.”

From the Archives: Author David Lampo brings gay-rights message to conservative Republicans

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on June 13, 2012. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016. I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

Author David Lampo brings gay-rights message to conservative Republicans

David Lampo, a longtime activist with the Virginia chapter of Log Cabin Republicans (LCR) and publications director at the libertarian Cato Institute, is author of a new book, A Fundamental Freedom: Why Republicans, Conservatives, and Libertarians Should Support Gay Rights, scheduled to be released on June 16 by Rowman & Littlefield.

Lampo spoke to the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner about the book at the 2012 Capital Pride festival on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, where he was promoting the book at the LCR information table.

He describes his book, A Fundamental Freedom, as “a primer about gay rights for Republicans [and] all right-of-center voters.”

GOP’s ‘bad reputation’
The Republican party, he explained, “has a bad reputation regarding gay rights and I thought it was time that somebody try to explain the concept and the philosophy behind [gay issues] from someone who shares their basic, fundamental political values.”

He felt it was important that “rather than liberals or leftists preaching at them about gay rights from the Left, I thought that somebody on the Right, specifically [someone] with a libertarian perspective, should address the issue with them.”

As might be expected, given the subtitle, the book is “primarily about gay issues, mostly at the federal level,” Lampo noted, as well as “the constitutional issues involved with the Tenth Amendment, DOMA [Defense of Marriage Act], a federal marriage amendment, and issues like that.”

The author explained that he was “inspired to write” A Fundamental Freedom last year, “at the beginning of the Republican presidential nomination process, because a lot of the comments and policies advocated by most of the candidates were so outrageous -- yet they rarely got any kickback from more mainstream or socially tolerant Republicans.”


Endless material
Lampo said that he “just got tired of the lack of a response to the most radical statements from people like Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum.”

Although there was, he said, “a never-ending amount of material coming out of the presidential nominating process,” he finished writing the book last fall before taking it to a publisher.

Lampo pointed out that some of the contestants for the GOP presidential nomination were more supportive on gay-rights issues than others, including former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman, former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson, and Texas Congressman Ron Paul.

In those cases, he said, “I usually contrast their positions with what most of the candidates said and did.”

The book’s last chapter, he explained, includes a “score card of all the major Republican candidates,” giving each a grade on a scale of A to F.

“Of course,” he noted, Huntsman and Johnson “and even Ron Paul do pretty well, but most of the others [received] Fs.”

DADT and libertarians
If one were to look for supportive Republicans on gay-rights issues, Lampo recommended going first to the Republicans in Congress who voted to repeal the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (DADT) policy of excluding openly gay members of the armed forces.

There were eight GOP Senators who voted to repeal DADT, including Scott Brown of Massachusetts and Richard Burr of North Carolina. Five Republicans in the House of Representatives voted for repeal: Judy Biggert of Illinois, Anh Cao of Louisiana, Charles Djou of Hawaii, Ron Paul of Texas, and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida.

“It was their votes that actually got it repealed,” Lampo asserted.

More generally, gay-supportive Republicans can be found “in the more libertarian wing of the party,” he said. Those are the people “who are going to have to lead on it and, in fact, have led.”

LCR and GOProud
The role of gay political groups like Log Cabin Republicans and GOProud can also not be discounted, he said.

“It’s self-evident that they’re the two main groups that have brought these issues to the attention of mainstream Republicans and conservative Republicans,” Lampo explained.

“I think their influence on” the Republican National Committee and on “Republican leaders in the House and Senate have been pretty remarkable given the history of the party on gay rights,” he concluded.

David Lampo will be the featured guest at a book-launch party for A Fundamental Freedom in Alexandria, Virginia, on Friday evening, June 15.

From the Archives: ‘Big Roads’ author Earl Swift brings interstate story to Charlottesville

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on March 24, 2012. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016. I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

‘Big Roads’ author Earl Swift brings interstate story to Charlottesville

By coincidence, on March 24, the same day that President Barack Obama used his weekly radio-video address to urge Congress to pass a transportation bill, pointing out that “after World War II, we connected our states with a system of highways,” author Earl Swift spoke at the 2012 Virginia Festival of the Book about his history of the U.S. interstates, The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways.

In his remarks, Swift noted that “movies do a bad job of showing what American life was like before the car.” Cities were notoriously dirty at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, and one reason people pushed for greater use of automobiles was that “they were less polluting than horses.”

Tons of manure

As an illustration, Swift pointed out that in New York City in 1900, there were “2.5 million pounds of manure deposited each day” as well as 60,000 gallons of horse urine. That amounted to 400,000 tons of horse manure each year in New York alone.

In an interview with the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner as he autographed copies of his book, Swift said that other cities were as bad or worse. Kansas City had a ratio of one horse for every 18 persons. Boston, he said, “stunk to high heaven and ‘had a rich equine flavor.’ That’s the way people described it back then.”

Before automobiles, Swift explained, “there was mud everywhere” and businessmen would show up for their meetings spattered with mud and excrement.

For that reason – and for many others – the “car has transformed society,” Swift told the audience of about 75 book lovers who showed up in the Charlottesville City Council Chambers on a rainy Saturday morning.

No mountains or rivers

Swift came to the idea of writing The Big Roads, he said, while watching a weather report on television.

The meteorologist, he recalled in an interview, “was standing in front of a map of the lower 48. As I watched, I realized that it featured no topography. It had been stripped of topography altogether. In place of mountains and rivers were the outlines of the states, a scattering of cities, and most prominently, interstate highways. The country had been reduced to a grid. I realized at the same time that that’s pretty much the way I had come to see the place, and this was a bit of revelation.”

Over the weeks that followed that morning, Swift said he had “a number of ‘mini-epiphanies’” that he came to see as related. For instance, he was able to find fresh asparagus, clementines, and strawberries in the supermarket at the same time of year, even though these fruits and vegetables have widely varied growing seasons.

“I realized that this was a relatively recent phenomenon,” he said -- a result of improved road transportation that could bring produce from farm to market quickly.

“One thing led to another,” he explained. “The effects of the roads, I guess, became more apparent to me than the roads themselves.”

Unique highway system

While other countries – even large ones like Canada, Russia, and China – have extensive road networks, Swift said, “no other region of the world has a system so damn big that required so much effort to build and that requires so much dedication to keep operational.”

While the legend is that President Dwight Eisenhower was inspired to build the interstate highway system after seeing the Autobahn in Germany during World War II, in fact the system's basic features were already in place, in terms of planning and legislation, long before Eisenhower was elected in 1952. What’s more, there was a cross-pollination of road-building techniques between the United States and Germany.

“It’s really a chicken-egg question as to which came first” with regard to the Autobahn or the interstate system, Swift explained, “because the superhighway network we have definitely was inspired by the success of the Autobahns but the Autobahns were built with the help of insights gained in tours of American engineering facilities. There’s a lot of shared parentage there.”

Swift traveled extensively around the country in the four years it took him to research and write his book. He naturally has thoughts about the best and worst stretches of interstate highways.

Good, bad, and ugly

I-77 and I-64 through Virginia and West Virginia, he said, are both “awfully pretty.”

Stretches of I-70 through Glenwood Canyon in Colorado and all through eastern Utah, he said, are “just phenomenal, while “I-80 across Utah and Nevada is beautiful in kind of a desolate, forbidding way” as is I-80 in Wyoming.

“There are lots of reasons to dislike stretches of highway,” he pointed out. I-35 between Fort Worth and Austin is “just trashy. It’s just ugly.” The Indiana Toll Road is an embarrassing eyesore.”

In addition, “pretty much all the interstates in Illinois are terribly maintained and just beat the crap out of you as you drive. The Long Island Expressway is the most harrowing three miles of road in America. Some people might like driving the Beltway but I-495 around D.C. is never pleasant. It’s a great highway but the people on it are nuts [and] it’s always crowded.”

Despite that, Swift has some grudging admiration for the Capital Beltway, one of the busiest roads in Virginia and Maryland.

“The Beltway was almost too easy to build,” he said. Building it “forced very few people out of their homes.”

One reason was foresight. “They bought it early enough,” he explained. “They bought the right-of-way way early,” about 1950. (The first stretch of the Beltway opened in 1961 and the road was completed in 1964.) As a result, “it predated the spread of D.C. into an ever-widening stain on the landscape.”

In addition to The Big Roads, the Norfolk-based Swift is author of Journey on the James: Three Weeks Through the Heart of Virginia, The Tangierman's Lament: and Other Tales of Virginia, and Where They Lay: Searching for America's Lost Soldiers. He has written for the Virginian-Pilot and other newspapers, as well as for Parade magazine, notably a 2009 feature on America’s decaying highway infrastructure.

From the Archives: Attorney Bruce Fein discusses NSA lawsuit, DHS spying, and FCC intrusions

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on February 21, 2014. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site was scheduled to go dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

Attorney Bruce Fein discusses NSA lawsuit, DHS spying, and FCC intrusions

Constitutional attorney and former Reagan administration official Bruce Fein spoke in Charlottesville on Thursday, February 20, about his book, Constitutional Peril: The Life and Death Struggle for Our Constitution and Democracy, at a forum sponsored by the Rutherford Institute and hosted by the Barnes & Noble at Barracks Road Shopping Center.

In an interview with the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner just before his presentation, Fein said he would also comment on events since the book's 2009 publication, events that illustrate how “violations of the constitution have become so chronic that they numb the public and even elected officials to the danger we encounter as we move toward what I call 'one branch tyranny' – secret government, [with] everything subordinated to a risk-free existence and absolute executive power.”

Since writing the book, he said, “ we've inched even further along that perilous path.”

NSA spying
One example came with the revelations that the National Security Agency has been engaged in domestic spying against American citizens. In response, Fein has been working with U.S. Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) on a law suit against President Barack Obama filed as a class action “on behalf of every single American who's made a phone call in the last five years.”

He explained that “the NSA since 2006 has been collecting, without any suspicion of wrongdoing, the telephony metadata on every single American's phone calls. That means they get the number you dialed, your own number, the duration of the call, and perhaps where the location is.”

The NSA collects this information, he said, even though the agency has “no suspicion at all that you're engaged in any kind of wrongdoing, that what you're doing has anything to do with foreign intelligence.”

The agency justifies its spying with the belief that, “by collecting this data, at some future point, they may be able to connect your phone number with a foreign phone number that has some possible connection with international terrorism.”

'Dragnet surveillance'
This, Fein said, “is a dragnet surveillance of staggering proportions” yet in the eight years since the program was initiated, “there have been no uses of the program that have resolved a single terrorism investigation.”

The argument of the lawsuit is that the NSA's metadata collection “violates the Fourth Amendment prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures,” he said. “You have a right to keep your metadata free from government surveillance and the fact that your phone company has it doesn't mean that you've expected the government to have it. The government can put you in prison; the phone company cannot.”

The resolution sought by the lawsuit is “to get a judicial order requiring the NSA to expunge from their database, which is perhaps the largest database in the history of the world, all of this telephony metadata, and forbid it from being collected in the future.”

If the lawsuit succeeds, he explained, “it would expunge all of the information that now hangs over everybody's head like a sword of Damocles.”

Collecting license plate data
Fein also commented on a recent news story that the Department of Homeland Security had put out a Request for Proposals (RFP) to track the location of every vehicle's license plate in the United States. (The RFP was later withdrawn in the face of public opposition.)

Even though the program was suspended, he said, “we can anticipate there'll be efforts to use surveillance drones to capture where Americans are 24 hours a day, if they step outside their home.”

This is, he explained, “all part of what I call the psychology of a risk-free existence. That's the bane of any republic because liberty can't persist without some risk.”

The DHS example shows how “the government feels that they should try to gather all information at all times about everything we do because it at some future time it might be connected with an international terrorist investigation, which again turns the whole idea of liberty on its head,” Fein explained.

“We have an inherent right to be let alone, just because we're human beings,” he said, “and that right can be disturbed only if the government can advance a compelling reason to think you're engaged in some kind of wrongdoing or have information relevant to some wrongdoing or antisocial behavior.”

Americans are not required to explain to the government “why we want to be let alone,” Fein explained, because “it's just inherent of being an American, and that has been turned on its head. The government now assumes that they have the right to get every [bit of] information they can conceive about you.”

FCC in TV newsrooms
Fein also commented on a program proposed by the Federal Communications Commission – also withdrawn in the face of public opposition – that would embed investigators in every television newsroom to determine how reporters decide what stories to feature on their broadcasts.

That kind of activity by the FCC, he said, “It is an outrage. We would expect that in Russia or China or maybe in Belarus.”

The FCC's proposal, he said, violates the understanding that “the government never has a right to impair anyone's privacy -- to look at anything that Americans are doing – unless they have, at the outset, some plausible basis to think wrongdoing is underway.”

In a republic, Fein said, “the people censure the government; the government does not censure the people.”

He concluded the interview by quoting Thomas Jefferson, who said: “When the government fears the people, you have liberty. When the people fear the government, you have tyranny.”

Unfortunately, Fein asserted, “we are approaching the latter, unless we change that trajectory very quickly.”

Bruce Fein also appeared on WCHV-FM's “Inside Charlottesville” with Coy Barefoot on the same evening he spoke at Barnes & Noble.

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Charlottesville entrepreneur Paul Jones sells non-lethal self-defense products

Original URL: http://www.examiner.com/article/attorney-bruce-fein-discusses-nsa-lawsuit-dhs-spying-and-fcc-intrusions

From the Archives: GOP can regain control of Senate in 2014, says strategist Grover Norquist

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on March 9, 2014. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site was scheduled to go dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

GOP can regain control of Senate in 2014, says strategist Grover Norquist

Republicans can regain a majority in the U.S. Senate in the 2014 general election and even Virginia Democrat Mark Warner is vulnerable, said strategist Grover Norquist in an interview at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which ended its three-day run on March 8 in suburban Washington, D.C.

Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform and author of Leave Us Alone: America's New Governing Majority, told the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner that he was encouraged by the CPAC turnout of more than 11,000 participants, including “a majority of people under 25,” which he characterized as “extremely, extremely healthy.”

'Dull roar'
In contrast to past years, he said, “the whining is down to a dull roar.” In terms of content – speeches and panel discussions – “we've really covered a whole host of broad center-right issues.”

Overall, Norquist said, "I'm pleased, I'm happy. It's going well. People are excited. We've got all these Senate races and the candidates are being highlighted, so it's good stuff.”

With regard to the prospects of the Republican Party taking control of the U.S. Senate this year, Norquist is optimistic.

Gaining a GOP majority is “more likely than not,” he said.

Republicans “need to pick up six for control. There are seven that look very, very good.”

The likely pick-ups are in “overwhelmingly Republican states with weak” Democrats holding those Senate seats, and there are “competent Republicans running."

Seven probable pick-ups
Norquist ticked off the names of the seven states: “Alaska, South Dakota, Montana, West Virginia, North Carolina, Louisiana, and Arkansas.”

In each of those seven, he said, there is “a fine candidate who's been nominated or will be nominated” and in “each of them, the Democrat is not as strong as they might like.”

All those states, he added, were won by Mitt Romney in 2012 with a margin of more than ten percent, and they have all been trending Republican “where our guys are pulling ahead.”

In addition to those likely seven pickups, Norquist continued, “you have a series of states like Michigan, where all polls have the Republican candidate ahead.”

He also mentioned New Hampshire, “where the Republicans have a real shot” and Iowa, “where you have to decide who the Republican [nominee] is but they all poll OK against” the Democrats' candidate.

In Iowa, he averred, “I suppose it's possible to nominate the guy who could lose” but in Colorado, “we have a weak Democrat and a [Republican] congressman who wasn't going to get in” has now entered the race, “clearing the field – so Colorado is in play with every reason to think we could win that one.”

Worrisome Georgia and Kentucky
There are two Republican-held seats to worry about, however.

First is Georgia, “because if you nominate the wrong guy, you could lose that, but there's a runoff, so I don't think they will nominate the wrong guy.”

The other is Kentucky, “where some people think [Minority Leader] Mitch McConnell should have passed a bunch of laws with 45 Republicans because they haven't learned to count.”

Instead, “they think it's because he's a liberal that he hasn't been able to beat the guy [Majority Leader Harry Reid] with 55 votes with [McConnell's] 45 votes. There are many things, perhaps, to criticize Mitch McConnell on. Not being able to win votes in the U.S. Senate with 45 [Republicans] is not one of those things you can fairly whine about.”

Still, Norquist cautioned, McConnell has “been damaged by his challenger in the primary. I'd keep an eye on that seat but I think Republicans should be able to take the Senate.”

Virginia's vulnerable Warner
Even in Virginia, where popular former Governor Mark Warner is seeking re-election to the U.S. Senate this year, Norquist sees reason for Republicans to be hopeful.

Warner is vulnerable, he said, basing his assessment on having spoken with the incumbent Senator at a recent event in Washington.

“I ran into Mark Warner at a party the other day and, he said, [he] wasn't in Davos” for the annual global economics conference because Republican challenger Ed Gillespie is running for office.

“'So I'm here,'” Norquist quoted Senator Warner.

Gillespie, who has three rivals for the GOP nomination (Tony DeTora, Shak Hill, and Chuck Moss) “is a competent candidate,” he explained. “He can raise money. He's uniting the party.”

Norquist concluded that, “with any sort of a good Republican year,” Virginia has “a Senate seat that Gillespie could win and Mark Warner could lose.”

Warner will face Libertarian candidate Robert Sarvis in the November election, as well as the eventual Republican nominee, who will be chosen at a convention in Roanoke on June 7.

The full audio interview with Grover Norquist will be available soon on Bearing Drift radio, The Score.

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Grover Norquist surveys the 2012 political and legislative landscape
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'Proselytizing for freedom,' Robert Sarvis bids for U.S. Senate in Virginia

Original URL: http://www.examiner.com/article/gop-can-regain-control-of-senate-2014-says-strategist-grover-norquist

From the Archives: Former U.S. ambassador to Vatican talks diplomacy at Virginia book festival

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on March 19, 2014. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site was scheduled to go dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

Former U.S. ambassador to Vatican talks diplomacy at Virginia book festival

Ambassador Francis Rooney came to Charlottesville on March 19 to speak about his recent book, The Global Vatican: An Inside Look at the Catholic Church, World Politics, and the Extraordinary Relationship between the United States and the Holy See. The occasion was a panel on “The United States in the World” at the twentieth annual Virginia Festival of the Book.

Rooney, who was President George W. Bush's envoy to the Holy See, participated in the discussion along with University of Virginia political scientist James Ceaser, University of Mary Washington professor Stephen Farnsworth, and Stanford University historian Robert Rakove. The panel was moderated by Sorensen Institute executive director Bob Gibson.

After the panel ended, Ambassador Rooney spoke to the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner about his book and about the Vatican's politics and diplomacy.

Pope and Congress
First, he commented on the invitation issued by Speaker of the House John Boehner, asking Pope Francis to address a joint meeting of Congress in 2015.

“Speaker Boehner,” he said, “is a devout Catholic and values the role the Holy See plays in the world.”

The idea of inviting the Pope to the U.S. Capitol “reflects the importance of Holy See diplomacy and the importance of the relationship with the United States,” Rooney noted. “It's never happened before” but it also “offers an interesting opportunity.”

Rooney said he would be surprised if Pope Francis accepts the invitation but the gesture itself demonstrates “the importance of Holy See diplomacy” to U.S. policymakers.

He added that there is a convergence of interests and values between Washington and the Vatican.

For instance, he said, the “principles of Holy See diplomacy apply to all persons.” These include “fundamental respect for human dignity, nurture of freedoms, especially religious freedom, and [seeking] to promote the natural rights of man.”

Human intelligence
Rooney also pointed out how the Vatican also is the locus of a worldwide human intelligence network, something that may be unparalleled elsewhere. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, he recalled, said the Catholic Church has “one of the greatest information gathering networks in the world.”

“One of the unique aspects of the Holy See is their global network of priests, nuns, NGOs. We get so much information from them,” he said, adding that there are “millions of vignettes of Holy See information surprising the United States in its, in what they've been able to find out.”

He gave the example of when Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, then the Vatican Secretary of State, visited President George H.W. Bush in the Oval Office.

When the meeting took place, Rooney said, Casaroli had just been told by some nuns “about a bridge being blown up in Lebanon.” This was pertinent because the United States and the Holy See had been working together to unify Lebanese Christians. Bush and Casaroli looked at a map together, with the cardinal pointing out where the missing bridge had been located.

The president was unaware of this information, so he called the CIA, which also had not learned about it. “How do they know that?,” the CIA asked.

'Holy See in action'
In writing his book, Rooney said, he “tried to minimize the memoir part. People's interests in ambassadorial memoirs are fairly circumscribed and, I think, justly so.”

Instead of focusing on himself, he “tried to put in the things that show the Holy See in action,” especially instances of “the Holy See and the United States working together.”

While doing research for his book, he learned “about the incredible ability of the Holy See to do good in the world diplomatically and how important this charge is,” as well as how much the United States and the Vatican have in common in terms of their foreign policy aims.

In addition, he said, prior to his experience as a diplomat and as a writer examining diplomacy, “I didn't fully appreciate the First Amendment, I didn't fully appreciate our unique concept of citizenship in the United States, until I saw how other countries work, especially European ones.”

Vatican II
Rooney also commented about how the articulation of ecumenism by the Second Vatican Council affected the Holy See's diplomacy, both positively and negatively.

Vatican II, he said, “brought it into the modern world. It would be pretty hard” for Vatican diplomats “to be taken seriously nowadays without Dignitatis Humanae and Nostra Aetate,” two key documents of the council.

“On the other hand,” he continued, there have been “three existential threats to Holy See diplomacy: one was Napoleon, one was the unification of Italy, and the third one was Vatican II – because a lot of priests wanted to turn inward and get out of the diplomatic business.”

They wanted to “have nuncios focus on recruiting bishops and appointing bishops” rather than on diplomacy, but Pope Paul VI, a graduate of the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy, (the Vatican's school for training diplomats) said that the Church has “an important role to play in the world.” Pope Paul, he asserted, “saved the diplomatic mission, if you will, of the Holy See.”

Ukraine and Russia
Finally, Rooney answered a question about the current dispute between largely-Catholic Ukraine and mostly-Orthodox Russia.

The situation there, he said, does not stem from religious differences but rather from geopolitics.

“It's Obama's weakness and the fact that [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, in some ways, even had President Bush's number – but he for sure has Obama's number.”

President Obama, he said, “has brought [Putin] to a point where he feels he can take actions which are against international law” without fear of serious reprisal.

The complete audio version of this interview will soon be available on Bearing Drift radio, "The Score."

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Original URL:  http://www.examiner.com/article/former-u-s-ambassador-to-vatican-talks-diplomacy-at-virginia-book-festival

From the Archives: UVA political scientist analyzes 2012 election, looks toward 2016 GOP nominee

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on March 19, 2014. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site was scheduled to go dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

UVA political scientist analyzes 2012 election, looks toward 2016 GOP nominee

James Ceaser teaches politics at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and is co-author (with Andrew Busch and John J. Pitney, Jr.) of the recent book, After Hope and Change: The 2012 Elections and American Politics.

Ceaser spoke about After Hope and Change at the 2014 Virginia Festival of the Book on March 19, participating in a panel discussion on “The United States in the World” with political scientist Stephen Farnsworth, historian Robert Rakove, and former ambassador Francis Rooney. The panel was moderated by Bob Gibson, a former political reporter with The Daily Progress.

After the panel, Professor Ceaser answered questions from the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner about lessons learned in the 2012 presidential campaign, the outlook for factional divisions in the Republican Party, and who the GOP presidential nominee might be in 2016.

'A different era'
In summing up his book, he explained that “After Hope and Change makes a comparison between the 2008 election, where 'hope and change' was the theme, where enthusiasm and uplift accompanied Obama's election, and 2012, which was kind of a letdown, [with] no inspiring theme [and] little enthusiasm.”

Those differences, he said, were recognized “by the Obama people themselves. They were contentious to win but” they knew that the electorate "had moved into a different era.”

The defining figure “was no longer the Obama of 2008,” Ceaser explained. “It was Obama elected in 2012 as a politician, not a cultural or moral leader of the whole world.”

One of the lessons learned from the 2012 election is that “the Democratic Party, as a base, has a slight advantage over the Republican Party,” he said. “I think that was confirmed. The Republicans went in thinking this was an election they could and should win, and they lost it.”

Swingers
Ceaser cautioned, however, that there is “still enough of a swing group in the American population that any election can swing to either party, given how people process the events under which they live. We may be seeing in 2014 a swing back to the Republicans. Who knows what will happen in 2016?”

What 2012 teaches us, he noted, is that the Democratic base has a slight advantage over the GOP but “enough people who still swing to make every election a struggle, the outcome of which is unknown.”

Divided Republicans
Factional differences between libertarians and social conservatives have been “part of the Republican Party for a long time,” Ceaser pointed out. “It all goes under the label of conservative, but you pick up the hood and you see that conservatism means different things to different people – hence conflict.”

This has historically “been the way things are,” he said, “but basically the Republicans have been able to come together sufficiently because of their opposition to the Democratic project to hang together, more or less.”

He warned, however, that people should not “expect the Republican party to be holding hands as various pieces are opposed on many issues.”

He pointed out that “perhaps the greatest division within the Republican party has been on foreign affairs,” and that it is significant that “the libertarian position [is] closer to a sort of softer isolationism than the rest of the party.”

GOP's 2016 nominee
Within this context, Ceaser has some general predictions about what to expect during the 2016 GOP presidential nomination contest.

“The libertarian candidate will do well, that is, maybe even have a plurality over a spread field but in the end will not have enough support to achieve the nomination, he said.

Ceaser said the 2016 candidate will not be someone who “will be very surprising,” but rather will be someone like Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, or Florida Senator Marco Rubio.

The nominee, he predicted, will be “someone who has some elements of respect for libertarians but is not himself libertarian.”

What about Rand Paul?
If Kentucky Senator Rand Paul is a candidate, he added, “he'll do quite well.”

Expressing some admiration for Paul's political skills, Ceaser offered that “it's one of the more amazing stories of American politics: This young senator from Kentucky, whose father was regarded in many ways as an extremist, [yet] Rand Paul has been able to take this movement and make it into something a lot larger in a very short period of time and acquire status as a significant player in the Republican party.”

Rand Paul, he concluded, is a “potential very strong candidate, even though I don't think he'll be over the top in 2016.”

The complete audio version of this interview will soon be available as a podcast on Bearing Drift radio, “The Score.”

SUGGESTED LINKS

Former U.S. ambassador to Vatican talks diplomacy at Virginia book festival
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Attorney Bruce Fein discusses NSA lawsuit, DHS spying, and FCC intrusions

Original URL: http://www.examiner.com/article/uva-political-scientist-analyzes-2012-election-looks-toward-2016-gop-nominee

From the Archives: First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams talks about free speech in Charlottesville

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on March 22, 2014. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site was scheduled to go dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams talks about free speech in Charlottesville

Floyd Abrams, an attorney who has argued for freedom of speech and freedom of the press before the U.S. Supreme Court in cases such as Citizens United and New York Times v. United States (the “Pentagon Papers”), came to Charlottesville on March 22 to speak at the Virginia Festival of the Book.

In a panel ostensibly about Abrams' recent book, Friend of the Court: On the Front Lines with the First Amendment, he was quizzed by Ronald L.K. Collins, author of Nuanced Absolutism: Floyd Abrams and the First Amendment, and audience members. Josh Wheeler, director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression, hosted the panel, which was held in the Charlottesville City Council chambers.

After he had autographed copies of his book for admiring readers, Abrams answered a few questions posed by the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner.

ACLU evolution
One concern of his is the evolution of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) towards a position that often seems at odds with free speech rather than in favor of it.

The ACLU, he said “is becoming more of a liberal organization – more of a progressive organization – than a free-speech protective one.”

That is not to say, he explained, “that they would not protect, on the face of it, the right of some conservatives who were thrown in jail for speech; they would.”

In “hard areas” such as campaign finance law, however, he said that the ACLU is “too willing to give up speech for what they consider to be other social benefits. I think that they hurt themselves as an institution and limit themselves in terms of serving as a protector of the public when they do so.”

Minority protection
Related to that, Abrams indicated that he agrees with the premise of Jonathan Rauch's book, Kindly Inquisitors (which he said he has not read), that posits that members of minority groups are better off in a robust free-speech regime than in a regime that limits speech for the purpose of protecting those same groups.

Minority groups, Abrams said, or “people who are weaker than stronger are the people who generally benefit the most from living in a free society and a society in which speech is free.”

While that may not satisfy “people who say, 'but we have some people with more power than other people because of their money,'” he argued that “anytime we cut back significantly on speech, the people who tend to get hurt most, if not first, are people without rather than with power.”

Tillman Act
With regard to campaign finance law, Abrams offered some thoughts on the Tillman Act of 1907, one of the first such laws. The Tillman Act, which banned corporate contributions to federal campaigns, has been criticized by Justice Clarence Thomas, who told Stetson University law students in 2010 that Senator Benjamin Tillman “was from South Carolina, and as I hear the story he was concerned that the corporations, Republican corporations, were favorable toward blacks and he felt that there was a need to regulate them.”

Abrams said the Tillman Act had “conflicting” aims.

“One was to limit corporate power and corporate control,” but, he added, “the Tillman Act also had significant racist aspects to it,” although it was “basically a reform piece of legislation designed to crack down on corporations.”

Lane v. Franks
Finally, Abrams talked about a free-speech case he is following that he expects to be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court.

“There's one I'm watching very closely,” he said, and he has filed a brief in it, “which is a follow-up to the Garcetti case of a few years ago [Garcetti v. Cebalos, 2006], which basically said, if you work for the government, and you're doing something within the course of your governmental duties, they can fire you for any reason, including your speech.”

The current case, Lane v. Franks, he explained, involves a former government employee in Alabama, who observed a politically-connected person who was being paid for a government job that he did not actually do, and “who revealed the fact that the other person was essentially acting criminally. The other person was convicted, jailed, fined $160,000, and they fired the guy who turned him in.”

According to the First Amendment Coalition, which filed Abrams' brief in the case, Lane v. Franks “tests the limits of the categorical, on-off rule of constitutional interpretation that was applied in Garcetti. We think (hope) that the Court chose to review the Lane v. Franks case to reverse the appeals court and clarify the Garcetti decision in a way that permits First Amendment protection for true speech by government employees, at least in circumstances where the speech serves a public or governmental interest.”

The question raised by this case, Abrams noted in Charlottesville, is this: “Is that really consistent with the First Amendment? Is it really consistent to say that when you tell the truth in court, you can be fired for that? I don't think the Supreme Court is going to say that, but that's one case I'm watching.”

The complete audio recording of this interview with Floyd Abrams will soon be available as a podcast on Bearing Drift radio, "The Score."

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Original URL:  http://www.examiner.com/article/first-amendment-attorney-floyd-abrams-talks-about-free-speech-charlottesville