 My name is David Bose, and I'm the executive vice president of the Institute. We're glad to see so many of you here. I expect that we're going to have more people coming in, but it looks like they'll mostly go to the back because we're full down here, so they won't be too much of a disruption. Tomorrow, as I'm sure you all know, is Juneteenth, which makes it a very appropriate time to be talking about the relationship between race and state, or perhaps more specifically, between the United States government and its African American citizens. Race is a particularly interesting topic for us to talk about here because it's always in the United States presented a challenge to advocates of limited government. It is the oldest and largest blemish on America's commitment to freedom and opportunity. The cause of federalism, we think that federalism is an important limit on federal power, the separation of powers, the division of powers within the federal government, and the division of powers between the federal government, the states, and the communities. But federalism got caught in the discussion of states' rights, of slavery, of Jim Crow, and to a great many people, the cause of federalism was tarnished. It was perceived as something that white Southerners were using as a protection for inimical attitudes and practices, and that I think has had real negative consequences for the structure of federalism in the United States ever since. So I think you're going to find that Judge Napolitano's new book, Dred Scott's Revenge, uses a fresh and provocative look at these issues, in particular a look at the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and how they have been applied or not applied to questions relating to race in the United States. Many years ago, when I was a young conservative and the scales had not yet fallen from my eyes, and I still regarded myself as a conservative, I used to read National Review, and I kept reading about this distinguished thinker that they kept talking about named Dean Manion, and it took me years to find out whether Dean was his name or his title, and I did eventually find out that his name was Clarence Manion, he was the dean at some point of the Notre Dame Law School. I suspect there are a lot of people who know of Judge Napolitano and are not absolutely sure if he has a first name. So I want to tell you that his name is Andrew, Judge Andrew Napolitano graduated from Princeton University and also from Notre Dame Law School in the years after Dean Manion's tenure there. He became the youngest life tenure judge in New Jersey history. For 11 years, he was also an adjunct professor at Seton Hall Law School, where he taught constitutional law and jurisprudence, and of course he is best known as the senior judicial analyst on the Fox News Channel for the past decade or so. He can be found at various points on the Fox schedule and the Fox Business Channel schedule. You sometimes see him hosting Fox and Friends, appearing on The O'Reilly Factor, sometimes other shows. He also hosts a daily radio show, Brian and the Judge, and he is heard regularly or seen regularly also on his Freedom Watch, which is broadcast over the web every Wednesday at 2 p.m. as part of Fox's strategy room programming. His previous books include Constitutional Chaos, A Nation of Sheep, and The Constitution in Exile, which was a book that was very well received by Jeff Rosen of the New Republic who has been desperate to prove that someone, on what he perceives as the right, actually uses the phrase, the Constitution in Exile. So he finally has a book to wave around. And you've got to be intrigued by a book that has drawn praise from Juan Williams, Nat Hentoff, and Glenn Beck. Let me go ahead and mention our other speakers before I invite Judge Napolitano up to the podium. I first noticed Damon Roots' articles in Reason Magazine on such topics as Thomas Jefferson and Race, The Progressives and Race, Franklin Roosevelt and Race, Frederick Douglas, and I guess Race Goes Without Saying There, the Jeffersonian who founded the NAACP and Judicial Protection of Individual Rights. And I thought this is a remarkable young writer who I don't yet know. And unfortunately, Reason's editors were more on the ball than I was, and they hired him, and he is now an editor at Reason and writes very frequently for both the magazine and the website. And our other speaker, our other commenter today will be Jason Kuznicki, my colleague here. He's the research fellow at the Cato Institute. He's also managing editor of our online magazine, Cato Unbound. He holds a PhD in history from Johns Hopkins, and he's recently completed a major research paper on racial discrimination in the state. So with that out of the way, let me welcome to the podium Judge Andrew Napolitano. Thank you, David. And thank you for explaining what my first name has been an obstacle all these years. I think that I was on the bench probably about a week when they assigned you small claims. You know, you walk out into a courtroom. There's about this many people in the courtroom. You have about five minutes for each case. The cases go like this. The dry cleaner ruined my blouse, but he also tried to pick up my sister. So a lawyer comes up to me and he says, Your Honor, I have a client that doesn't speak any English. We need a translator. We need the Italian translator in the courthouse. I call the administrator's office. The translator is busy in another courtroom. So I say to the throngs, is there anybody in this room that can speak Italian? A little guy in the back raises his hand. He comes up. We swear in this translator to tell the truth. We administer the oath to the witness, and here's exactly literally what happens. Lawyer to translator, give the court your name. Translator to witness. What is a you name? That's all right. Let me see where this is going to go. Lawyer to translator, tell the court your address. Lawyer to witness, where is the you house? I looked at this guy. I said, I thought you told me that you could speak Italian. He said, I can't hear one of my English. She said, she's not as so good. One time I was picking a jury in New Jersey as in the federal system and as in many states, the judge actually picks the jury. And again, you're confronted with a crowd about this size and you have to extract 12 people who have no bias, no interest in the outcome, no prejudice about the defendant or the state, and no knowledge of the facts in the case. So you begin to ask questions to a weedle the group down. And I say to the crowd, is there anybody here that can't serve on this case? It was a criminal case, the allegations, the indictment against the defendant was drug distribution. Little woman in the pack raised her hand and she says, I can't be on this case because of my occupation. I thought to myself, what could she possibly do? I said, all right, madam, what do you do? She said, I'm a soothsayer. Who the heck calls themselves a soothsayer in 1995? So I fall for this. I said, okay, how does that keep you from being on this jury? She said, judge, I already know how the case ends up. I should have said, tell us and save us the next three weeks in the courtroom. So from a ridiculous trial, these two that I'm telling you about, to one of the most serious in the history of the world, in which the defendant is presenting his own defense to the jury. And he says this, you'll know these words from the play and from the movie, but they are literally extracted from the trial. Some men say the earth is flat and some men say it is round. But if it is flat, can the parliament's laws make it round? And if it is round, can the king's command flatten it? It was, of course, Thomas Moore arguing in his trial for high treason, the alleged and by their standards proven acts of treason, where his refusal to assent to the king being head of the church on earth. He was appealing, of course, not only to the common sense of his jury, but also to their understanding of the natural law. Of course, the parliament can't change the shape of the earth. And of course, the king can't do so either, even though they both behaved as if they could. We fast forward a couple of hundred years and Jefferson, notwithstanding his personal behavior, my hero amongst American presidents, because he believed that the individual was greater than the state, and the state is greater than the federal government. Jefferson argues in the Declaration of Independence, you know these words every school child does, that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, and that among these is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. He weds to the American soul the natural law. The same argument that Thomas Moore was making, that our rights come from our humanity as a gift from God. Jefferson rejects, though the Constitution in some parts accepts the idea of positivism, which is what all the big government types in both parties believe today. They believe that our rights come from the government, not from our humanity. And that the same government that grants our rights can un-grant them. They even believe that our rights can be taken away from us by a law of the Congress or an edict of the president, like you're an enemy combatant, and therefore all your rights are taken away from you. Well, this of course directly rejects the Thomas Moore understanding, which is the Thomas Aquinas understanding of rights passed from the creator, who's perfectly free through his creatures who are perfectly free. Obviously we are perfectly free. Look at the abuse of free will every day. This is such a great gift from God. He permits us to use it with utter freedom to abuse it in the most horrific ways, but we only have it because it is his gift. So with that as a premise, and if you know my thoughts and my work and if you have seen my previous books, you know that I hold myself out as an unabashed champion of the natural law. And I've argued in almost every forum that will hear me, that will have me, that it is a natural restraint on all government. I decided to write this book. I mean, we live in an era in which the natural law is utterly disregarded. It is trashed by government as much as the Constitution itself is. So Dred Scott is a metaphor. This book is not about Dred Scott, though there is a chapter about his case because it is so fascinating. Dred Scott is a metaphor for a government, a series of governments, state governments and the federal government, that notwithstanding the lofty words of the Declaration of Independence and notwithstanding some efforts to incorporate those ideas into the Constitution via the Bill of Rights, the First Ten Amendments, a government that would think it could write any law, enact any policy and enforce any program notwithstanding its utter rejection of the natural law. So how could the same generation that wrote All Men Are Created Equal possibly have enforced slavery? I can't answer that in this book, but I want to stir the pot about it. The book starts with the slave trade and ends with the election of Barack Obama as president, and it uses the Dred Scott case, as I said, as a prism through which to examine what governments would do. Like one of the first laws that George Washington, the father of our country, signed was the Fugitive Slave Act, which made you immune from a state kidnapping law if you in a northern state kidnapped a runaway slave and forced that person back to his owner. Interesting, the debate going on today about state nullification. Montana is attempting to nullify certain federal firearms regulations. In 1834, the legislature of Massachusetts purported to nullify the Fugitive Slave Law and said to law enforcement personnel in Massachusetts, if anybody kidnaps a fugitive slave in Massachusetts, you ought to prosecute them for kidnapping because we don't recognize the Fugitive Slave Law. Nevertheless, it was signed into law by the father of our country, who, when the capital of the country was in Philadelphia and the legislature of Pennsylvania outlawed slavery, they put a clause in the statute saying all slaves in the state of Pennsylvania must be freed within six months of their entry into the state. So what do you think George and Martha did with the slaves from Mount Vernon? They rotated them through every five and a half months so that the president and his retinue and his wife in Philadelphia could have all the slaves they wanted servicing them without being in technical violation, though obviously being in violation of the spirit of the Pennsylvania statute. I make a lot of enemies when I tell people that I think that the worst president in American history and the one with least fidelity to the Constitution was Abraham Lincoln. I make a lot of enemies when I say that. I haven't made the enemies amongst the people that signed the paychecks at Fox yet, so I do keep saying these things. And I make the arguments in here about Lincoln's true purpose in the Civil War. It was not to free the slaves. If you read both portions of the Emancipation Proclamation, you must read the second portion, which probably was not described to you by your public school teachers in which the so-called great emancipator specifically authorized the institution of slavery in four border states in the city of New Orleans and in the six parishes surrounding New Orleans. The Dred Scott case is a lesson for us today because of the manner in which the Supreme Court addressed this. If you're a lawyer, it's a tortuous and fascinating procedural history. But to break it down to its essentials, Dred Scott is born as a slave in Virginia and after a series of masters finds himself in Illinois where he sues for his freedom. The case eventually makes its way to Missouri in the era of the Missouri Compromise and eventually the case makes its way to the Supreme Court of the United States. Now, in those days, the Supreme Court did not issue opinions the way it does today. That is, they didn't sit around a table and decide. All right, five to four, six to three, seven to two. Each justice wrote his own. There were no female justices, of course, in those days. Each justice wrote his own opinion and whatever the vote was, say after they saw each other's opinion, that's what it was. In this case, we have Roger Brooke Tawny, who is the former attorney general of the state of Maryland and who's an adversary, a political adversary of Lincoln, much like if you would Chief Justice John Marshall and his first cousin with whom he never spoke, Thomas Jefferson. They were political adversaries. So Roger Brooke Tawny thinking that he can forestall the Civil War could have written, once a slave, always a slave, because slaves were deemed property in half the country, or once set free, always set free because he was, at one point in his life, set free. Instead, the Chief Justice comes down with an opinion that is the worst of all possible resolutions of this and as we know from what happened five years later, it didn't resolve anything. And that is, we can't hear your case, Mr. Scott, because you're not a person. Because under the Constitution, you're not a person and only persons can bring matters into the federal court system. Now, you may say, well, that happened in the 1850s. It's not gonna happen in our lifetimes. It happened in 1973, January 22nd, 1973, when the Supreme Court issued, I don't know which is the worst case, but it's among these two. It's either Dred Scott or Roe versus Wade, Roe versus Wade, which articulated that babies in the womb are not persons. And so no one can sue in their behalf and they can be slaughtered up to the moment of birth. My own home state of New Jersey permits abortion up to the moment of birth, and if you can't afford it, the state will pay for you. They claim that that's in the New Jersey Constitution. I took an oath to uphold the New Jersey Constitution. I've read it many times, I assure you it's not there. But these are examples, historic and modern, of government thinking that it can do away with the natural law, that it can suspend the free will of a class of human beings, whether it is blacks up to the time of the Civil Rights Revolution in the 60s. I mean, in many respects, Jim Crow is just another form of slavery. And the Supreme Court spawned that with Plessy versus Ferguson. Yes, you can separate the races as long as you treat them equally. The equal treatment obviously was a farce and it didn't begin to unravel until Brown versus Board of Education. I'll make a little confession to you. When I was in law school and college and even as a young lawyer, I thought and argued that Brown versus Board of Education was unconstitutional because the issue of education is not cognizable by the federal system until I began studying a little deeper, Aquinas and Jefferson in the notion of the natural law. The government can't treat people differently on the basis of the color of their skin. And judges in this country must use the natural law to eradicate racism or any behavior that violates the natural law from the armament of the government. Just as George W. Bush can't say to Jose Padilla, you have no rights just because I declare you to be an enemy combatant, thereby violating a host of Mr. Padilla's natural rights. George Washington can't say to African Americans, you may be kidnapped if you escape by whites just because you are politically impotent and just because a majority in the Congress says so. When Jeremiah Wright, you remember him, the president listened to those sermons for a number of years. When those sermons were being played and played over and over again in the media, a little over a year ago, and it looked like Senator Obama was going to lose the race for the nomination, I began to get letters and emails and a lot of callers on the radio from sincere African Americans who were saying to me, you know, some of the stuff he is saying is a metaphor. He may be saying the U.S. government caused AIDS and gave it to black men, but Judge, take a look at the Tuskegee experiment about which there is a chapter in my book in which the United States Public Health Service in 1932 persuaded hundreds, hundreds of black men to come under the care of the public health service and that it would cure them of syphilis. It gave them syphilis. It did not cure them of anything. It monitored their bodily functions as they slowly and painfully wasted away from a disease that your government and mine gave to them and lied to the world about. It would take of all people, Richard Nixon in 1972 who couldn't believe that he had been vice president for eight years and president for four years before he knew that the health service was doing this to put an absolute stop to it. So sometimes we need, no, all the time we need to watch the government. It's one of the reasons that Cato came into existence. It's one of the reasons that so many of us risk comfort to defend freedom. Any government that thinks that it can suspend the free will of a class of human beings because of the color of their skin or their age or their political unpopularity or the declaration of one person, the president. Any government that is strong enough to do that and can get away with it is a government that is dangerous indeed and a government that we need to be careful when monitoring. Unfortunately, the positivists and the collectivists and the big government types rule the day and have consistently, at least since the era of FDR, maybe since the era of Woodrow Wilson, perhaps since the era of Abraham Lincoln. And my alma mater, Princeton, Woodrow Wilson is revered. He was the president of Princeton and then the governor of New Jersey and then the president of the United States whose grand ideas about making the world safe for democracy were picked up in a perverse way years later by George Bush. Woodrow Wilson segregated the federal government. The federal government and the military were integrated until this president from Virginia, born in Virginia, educated, raised, spent his professional life in New Jersey, decided that people had to be separated by race. Even FDR didn't have the courage to segregate, to desegregate the federal government and the military. Harry Truman did it with the stroke of a pen. Couldn't believe that it hadn't been done before that. I'm not a fan of Harry Truman, but I say this to you to indicate the ease with which certain old chivalrous and traditions can be swept away when it is clear from the prism of our present lives that those old traditions violate the natural law. So where are we today? We have a biracial president, objectively a very good thing. I don't see a black man when I criticize his activity on the economy and other things that he has done. I see an articulate, handsome, intelligent liberal who's doing what he said he would do for the most part and capture the imagination of the public. I see someone who maybe, maybe can help us enter a post-racial part of our history. Unfortunately, his respect for the Constitution is just as bad, maybe even worse than his predecessors. The obligation of contract, forget about it. The sanctity of private property, its history. The ability of people to pool their investments and make them prudently as they wish without having to get the government's permission. They're about to be gone. Who's gonna monitor this? The Federal Reserve. Look, the job of the CIA is to steal and to keep secrets. We know more about the CIA than we do the Federal Reserve. And that's the great super secret bank that he wants to give the power to regulate virtually any human activity in the United States which in the opinion of the Federal Reserve should it fail would affect liquidity. Now they can define fail, affect and liquidity however they want. What's the point of all this? A disregard for your natural right to contract. A disregard and utter disregard to due process. Madison wrote, the government shall not take life, liberty or property without due process. That means a trial. That doesn't mean a statute or an executive order. It means a trial. Don't hold your breath. Jefferson. Jefferson's a stumbling block especially for people like I who loved and love many of things he wrote and did and said. Jefferson introduced legislation when he was the governor of Virginia. This is hard to believe to abolish slavery in Virginia. It didn't pass. Some have argued he introduced it so he could sort of get credit for introducing it because he knew it would never pass but it didn't pass. Jefferson as the President of the United States signed the law pursuant to the Constitution in validating the slave trade. Jefferson wrote words that would later be condemned by the pro-slavery crowd in the South. They would blame him for getting the ball rolling with all men are created equal. But at the time he wrote those words he had over 200 slaves with one of whom there is now ample evidence to conclude. He lived in an intimate relationship for 40 years and fathered seven children. Well that's not why the pro-slavery crowd a generation later would blast him because he had sex with a black woman and she lived with him as his mistress in Paris in Philadelphia and in the White House which he designed but because he wrote all men are created equal. He also wrote when the people fear the government there is tyranny. When the government fears the people there is liberty. And when we defend the natural law and when we insist the government stay within the footprint of the Constitution the government will be afraid of us. Thank you, thanks for listening to me today. Thank you judge. I might just notice for those of you who are intrigued by his comment about the secrecy at the Federal Reserve Congressman Ron Paul will be speaking here next week also with two knowledgeable critics and so we should have a lively discussion of whether there should be more transparency and more congressional oversight of the Federal Reserve. And with that let me welcome Damon Root from Reason Magazine for some comments. All right thank you David for the warm introduction earlier. Thank you everyone to Cato for having me here today. Thank you to the judge for your remarks but also for the book. I'd like to begin with two quotes one of which I'm sure most of you are familiar with and maybe not the second. So first dates January 27th, 1843 where in a resolution by the American Anti-Slavery Society William Lloyd Garrison the famous abolitionist denounces the US Constitution. He calls it quote a covenant with death and an agreement with hell. Now the second quote fast forward a few years to 1852 Frederick Douglass also a great abolitionist Frederick Douglass an escaped former slave self-taught author editor and leading abolitionist orator. And Frederick Douglass he's speaking in Rochester, New York before the Rochester Ladies Anti-Slavery Society and he says take the Constitution according to its plain reading. I defy the presentation of a single pro-slavery clause in it. In fact he goes on interpreted as it ought to be interpreted the Constitution is a glorious liberty document. So who's right? Is the Constitution a agreement with hell or is it a glorious liberty document? Is the Constitution sanctioned slavery or does it forbid slavery? Now these questions don't appear directly in the judge's book but I think that they really get at the heart of Dred Scott's revenge and the heart of what he's talking about. So that's why I wanted to begin with those. Now this is a very interesting book and it's very surprising. So let me just run through some of the interesting parts and then I'll go into why I think it's surprising actually. Now the subtitle is a legal history of race and freedom in America. So we get a sweeping historical narrative as the judge says begins with the origins of the Atlantic slave trade, the bringing of slaves to the new world through the founding of the American government, the Civil War, reconstruction Jim Crow up to the election of Barack Obama. There's also a chapter on baseball which you didn't mention. Chapter on baseball about Jackie Robinson's entry into major league baseball and this is a great story and it's told extremely well and I have to say it's actually one of the few really positive stories in the book. Generally this book is actually fairly shocking. It's a little horrifying, it's disturbing. That's not your fault, I mean that's the government's fault, right? I mean that's your argument. I mean your quote is that the real culprit through our racial history has been the government. That the government on every level, federal, state and local has permitted, aided and abetted just the worst forms of racism and racial collectivism. So we're talking about slavery, lynching and then the violation of fundamental individual rights, private property, the right to keep and bear arms, go down the list. The government has violated these throughout American history and I think the book does a very good job of detailing that and justifying that. So if you encounter folks on maybe on the left hand side of the aisle who say oh no it's the free market, the judge presents the evidence that this is the government is behind these things. So as I said it's very interesting. There's a lot to chew on if you're interested in American history this is a great book. Now another thing that he does is draws on his experience as a superior court judge in New Jersey to talk about how this shameful racism is very much still with us. So it's, and it permeates our legal system even today and he draws examples from the war on drugs as well as from the prosecution and executions and death penalty cases that there is just a shameful racial imbalance going on there. So this is not just the founding, this is not just Jefferson as you say, this is, I mean this is through to the present day and this is very much still with us and I think that's a very important point. But I also said it was a surprising book so let me go into why I think it was surprising. I feel like this book doesn't give the written constitution its full due and I'm very surprised to say that. I'm surprised to be here saying that to the judge of all people. Remember his first book is called Constitutional Chaos, what happens when the government violates its own laws. He follows that up with the Constitution in exile as David mentioned, how the federal government has seized power by rewriting the supreme law of the land. Anyone who's watched him on Fox News, listened to his radio show knows that he is a stickler for constitutional law. He recently suggested that former President Bush might be a felon for approving torture. I'm sure the Fox viewers really enjoyed hearing that. Maybe in the Q and A you could share some of the viewer response you received. More Fox management than I'm worried about. So I mean that's a little bit of the context for why I'm surprised but I still am. I'm not sure that the book gives the written constitution its full due and that goes back to these two quotes I opened with. So is the constitution an agreement with hell or is it a glorious liberty document? And I think, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that Dred Scott's revenge comes down more on the Garrisonian side than Frederick Douglass' side. And let me bring that up not as, but really it is a question. And I'm kind of throwing out the first question of the Q and A period here with that. But I also think this is where the judge's views on natural law really come into play. What he says is that in those instances where the laws of the land, and that includes the constitution, violate the natural law, judges have a duty to disobey, have a duty to disobey the law. Now I'm with you that when a federal law, a state law, a local law violates the constitution, the judges should be activist and they should overturn those laws, they should strike them down and obey the constitution. But I am concerned about encouraging judges to disobey and your word actually is sidestep. They should sidestep the written law in order to enforce the natural law and I'm concerned about allowing judges, encouraging judges to sidestep the constitution. Because what's to stop a judge say from sidesteping the constitution to enforce social justice or rather than enforcing natural law and enforce mother nature's law, some sort of environmental worldview, something like that. So that's a concern I have, but I should say I mean I'm with you. Let me, as the president says, let me be clear. I am with you. Please be clearer. Let me be clear. I'm with you on the natural law. I think the constitution and the declaration of independence are steeped in natural rights. John Locke has written all over these documents and I think that's Frederick Douglass's point. And so that's what I mean by the coming down on the Douglass side or the Garrisonian side. I'd also like to suggest that it's not necessary to sidestep the constitution to fight for equal rights. As Douglass said during slavery, it wasn't necessary. He said that the constitution was the abolitionist greatest weapon against the slaveholders and he used it in that way repeatedly over and over again. He said that just because we've strayed away from the principles of the founding and practice doesn't mean we should abandon the founding documents. That they're ours. They're on the side of liberty and they're on the side of freedom and I think that that's right. He said, look to the constitution and quote, it will be found to contain principles and purposes entirely hostile to the existence of slavery. So now let me give a second surprise I found at the book which was I would have liked to hear more about private property and economic liberty because I don't think you can, I think American racism can only be understood if you also understand that part of it was a fundamental just assault by the government on economic liberty and on private property. Obviously slavery, man cannot own property in man. That was an abolitionist tenet. So there you go. That's a violation of natural law of natural rights, the right to own property in yourself. That's in John Locke. But also if we talk about the Jim Crow era. What Jim Crow is, is a fundamental assault on economic liberty. So let's take, and the judge mentioned this, Plessy versus Ferguson, the most famous case. This is the symbol of Jim Crow. And so here you have a Louisiana law that tells the railroads you cannot sell a first class ticket to black passengers. And the Supreme Court says, yeah, that's correct, 1896. And this is where you get separate but equal. So what is this? You cannot sell a ticket to this person and you can't buy a ticket from that person who wants to sell it to you. That is a fundamental violation of economic liberty. And that is the symbol of Jim Crow. So I think that for those of us, I mean I'm a libertarian, I think many people in the room here are libertarians who believe in free market principles, various forms. I think that's something that needs to be repeated and needs to always be remembered, that that's at the heart of Jim Crow is this assault on economic liberty. And what you have after that is just this orgy of whites-only laws of restrictions on who can go into restaurants, who can go to beaches, movie theaters, et cetera. Now no doubt many of those businesses would have mistreated or even excluded black customers whatever the law says. However, in a market free of Jim Crow regulations, you would have had other businesses running to attract those customers and attract more importantly those dollars, those black dollars. And that's the way that the market undermines state sanctioned discrimination. I'm with Frederick Douglass. Interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a glorious liberty document. Now as I mentioned earlier, there's the chapter on baseball. And I think that story's told very well. It's a great part of the book. And as I said, it's an uplifting story and it's one of the few uplifting stories. I mean this is a shameful part of American history and it's not pretty. What you're reading about is not pretty. It's important to know, but it's not what you'd call a beach read maybe. So in closing, I'd like to tell another positive story. Now this one isn't in the book, but I think it could be. I think it's in the spirit of Dred Scott's Revenge. So this is 1917. The NAACP, the National Association of Advancement of Colored People, which is just a few years old at this point, wins its first major victory before the Supreme Court. It's a case called Buchanan versus Warley. And the NAACP wins this case by arguing on behalf of property rights and on behalf of economic liberty. Now the issue was a Jim Crow law that restricted residential housing. So blacks could not live on majority white blocks and whites could not live on majority black blocks. So the NAACP brings soup, makes it to the Supreme Court. Morefield Story, who you alluded to in your remarks, who is the president of the NAACP, he's one of the founders. Now he's a great libertarian hero. This is a guy I believed in free trade, the gold standard. He was the founder of the NAACP. He was also a founder of the Anti-Imperialist League. So Story argues before the court that by telling a black property owner you can't do what you want with your own property that destroys property rights and violates the Constitution. The Supreme Court agrees they strike down this ordinance. Now here's what one leading legal scholar said about that decision. He said, though it was not used to fulfill its full potential, Buchanan almost certainly prevented governments from passing far harsher segregation laws and prevented residential segregation laws from being the leading edge of broader anti-negro measures. So I would say that that is Dred Scott's revenge. That's the Constitution in action. That is Frederick Douglass' vision of a colorblind Constitution of a glorious liberty document. And so I think that's a little bit of in the spirit of the books. I wanted to bring that up, but mostly I think this is a very interesting book. I'd encourage you all to read it. There's a lot of stuff, as the judge says, that you didn't learn in public school that you're gonna learn in this book. And I think that that's very important. So thank you and thank you again. Thanks to all you for listening. Thank you, Damon. And our second commenter will be my colleague from Cato, Jason Kuznicki. Thank you. I'd like to start by saying, Judge Napolitano, I actually enjoyed this book. And I know that it does deal with a depressing and at times a very disturbing subject, but I have a background as a historian. How did you like that biography of Adolf Hitler? It was wonderful. It was really, you can say these things as a historian. You can, because you're supposed to be able to take a little bit of a step back from the material and to think about it critically. And in that vein, I'm gonna ask some questions of you. And I hope to provoke some discussion, but I want you to understand that they are from a deeply sympathetic place and that I in general thought that this was really an excellent book. It's an important book. It's an important book because it blends or merges together two stories that are important in American history that are not often talked about together or are not often written about together. The first is the story of race relations in America and the second is the story of individual natural rights. Now, there are a lot of books about race in America, but I found frequently in reading them that they do not have much sensitivity to the idea that rights are individual and natural. There's very often a concern for group rights or group responsibilities or group identities. Not so much is there an appreciation for and a defense of the idea that rights are individual. And on the other side, there are a lot of books about individual rights, but their treatment of race tends to be superficial or dismissive, why is this even important or why should we care about this? And I find those also problematic. This book looks at both of them and that's what I think is very valuable about it. And because it looks at both of them, it does some very surprising things like the material on Lincoln, which I think will surprise a lot of people. Now, if you read pretty deeply in libertarian literature, you will find tons and tons of material critical of Lincoln, some of it good, some of it not as good. If you really, really want a strong and principled and thought-provoking argument for why Lincoln was not always cracked up to be, it's here, it's in this book. This is exhibit A, I would say, in the case against Abraham Lincoln. Also FDR and the New Deal. And there are a lot of things that we are told are uniformly good in our public school educations that we should maybe take a second and more critical look at. And one of the books that I was reminded of continually while reading Dred Scott's Revenge, it was a book by Ira Katz-Nelson. It's called When Affirmative Action Was White. And Katz-Nelson makes the argument that many of the programs of the New Deal, the social welfare legislation that was passed under Franklin Roosevelt, many of these programs were in fact, profoundly biased against African-Americans, either by explicit design or through frank inattention to the social realities on the ground. So for example, social security, as it was first conceived, did not apply to domestic help and did not apply to farm workers. Now, these were occupations in which the vast majority of African-Americans still worked. And everyone in the South knew this. And that's why Southern senators supported what would otherwise perhaps have been a objectionable piece of legislation to them. They knew that this would basically be welfare for whites and not for blacks. Similarly, the Federal Housing Administration, the FHA gave subsidized loans to people who wanted to be first-time home buyers. And if we're going to say that there's a libertarian case against welfare, yes, of course there is. But this is, I would say, a fairly benign form of welfare in that at that time and in that place, housing wealth turned out to be a fantastic investment. Not so much today, but it certainly was at the time. And very soon after these subsidized loans were made available, housing wealth was, in fact, the largest single source of wealth for the typical American anywhere in the country. However, however, it was extraordinarily difficult for blacks to get loans to buy houses in FHA-approved neighborhoods. Extraordinarily hard. And this is where the term redlining comes from. There were, in fact, maps of approved neighborhoods and neighborhoods that would not be approved for these subsidized loans. And they were segregated. This was, in fact, welfare for white people, not for black people. And this is not something that you are likely to encounter in a typical public high school education. You're not likely to see this. You may hear about redlining. You're likely to hear that it happens in the private sector. In fact, the research on redlining in the private sector is fairly skeptical that it even exists at all, or if it does, it's maybe under the table or half-hearted or here or there or isolated. It's nothing like what happened in the FHA where there were actual, literal red lines on the map. This neighborhood is for white people. It's a very different thing. So what we had in the New Deal was, in a sense, affirmative action for white people. And that was Katz Nelson's point. And this leads me to my first big question for you, Judge Napolitano. Katz Nelson takes this in a very interesting direction. He says, because there was this affirmative action for white people and because it was so recent and because many of these people are still alive or their children are still alive and they were economically disadvantaged, this is, in his estimation, a strong argument in favor of affirmative action for black people. And what should we do, if not affirmative action, to rectify these economic inequalities that were based on race that are still patterned racially that were caused by the government itself? What do we do about that? Well, it's impossible to eradicate all of them dollar for dollar in terms of the people who suffered. I have not read Katz Nelson's work. I'm familiar with the thesis of it. I understand, as you've explained so nicely, redlining. And I understand the way in which FDR got the southern senators to vote in favor of social security, probably, as you say, so nicely not something you learned in the public schools. But just as it is a violation of the natural law for the government to have two sets of laws, one for whites, one for blacks, it's a violation of natural rights for the government to recognize color in any respect. And so it is basically the command that the government be colorblind that eliminates it from favoring or disfavoring, whether it's to redress a crass, well-known and horrific historic evil, or whether it's to try and give somebody a boost who didn't have it because of the way the government treated their parents. It would be impossible for the government to do that fairly, equitably, and economically today. And I take literally at least a half dozen Supreme Court opinions arguing for the proposition that the government may not consider race in its armament whatsoever when it makes decisions. Okay, that's about what I expected that you might have as a response, but I thought- Is that a good response or not? No, I think it's actually pretty good. I think it's pretty good. I wanted to bring this up because I think- The professor says that's the answer I expected from you. It's an important second move after the initial move, which has, I think, been made in your book. And I think it's something that naturally suggests itself. And I wanted to hear what your thoughts were there. My second question is a bit more philosophical. In particular on page 139 and 140 of the book, but also throughout, you write things like this. You write, one nation under God, indivisible. The very phrase suggests a belief in natural law that has validity everywhere. The natural law is rarely mentioned because it is universally understood that certain truths are natural and are not debatable. Among these truths is the fact that skin color is irrelevant to natural rights and personal dignity. All right, so we have natural rights that are not debatable. They are universal. They exist everywhere. And then on page 40 and onto 41, you write, throughout the 19th century, American courts would repeatedly put the judicial stamp of approval on the institution of slavery. Facially, these cases place the judiciary in the realm of fault for perpetuating the horrors that the Constitutional Convention mandated. However, despite slavery's patent incompatibility with natural law, is it the role of the courts to sidestep the positive law of the land when natural law is violated? Your answer is yes. And your answer is yes in all capital letters. Yes. Okay. How do we recognize natural law when we encounter it? That's my question. And I ask this question for a number of reasons. First, there have been philosophers of great mental ability, great probity, who have believed in the existence of natural slaves. Aristotle and Plato both discussed this possibility and both at times seemed to agree with it. Now, Plato is a bit debatable. He has some dialogues of his where he suggests that people, in fact, are all equal and others where he suggests that some people are natural slaves. And this has led Karl Popper to speculate that Plato was actually two different people or that he had two different phases of his life that he went through that he changed his mind very radically or maybe these texts are not exactly reflective of what he believed. But anyway, there's this idea out there that there are such a thing as a natural slave. And so this is a claim about natural law. How do we dismiss claims like that? And I'll give another example. Suppose that I were a judge in 1872 and a defendant comes before me. And her crime is that she voted in an election. Now, this actually happened. This is the story of Susan B. Anthony. And she says, I am just as much a human being as a man is. And if you're going to give voting to men, then you should also give it to women. Now, this, to my mind, is also a claim about natural rights. It seems to me that she has a very obvious natural rights case and that she is correct. Now, by your reasoning, should the judge in her case have found that yes, she had a right to vote and that the Constitution and the positive law should have been disregarded in that case? Great questions, brilliant, brilliant, sharp questions that, of course, we could talk about for a long time. And I would guess as an outset that if Augustine and Aquinas and Jefferson were in the room with us, even they couldn't agree as to exactly what the natural law is. That's the difficulty with the natural law and it's the attractiveness of positivism. Positivism, in positivism, the law is written down. Women cannot vote or didn't say it that way. Only property owning males who have reached their 21st birthday may vote. It's crystal clear. So that is a problem that I concede with the natural law is that not everyone knows it, not everyone understands it and even those who do will disagree on what it means. But the essence of it is that you sort of know it when you feel it. The natural yearnings that all of us have for certain expressive liberties, for the right to be left alone, for privacy, for freedom from unwarranted restraint, for being treated equally by the government. We all know that these are natural rights because they stem from our humanity because we all, except those who are deranged, seek them. Can you put your hand on clearly what is and what is not the natural law and get everybody to agree, no. Is there a natural law argument for slavery? It was made, I reject it. The more modern natural law theorists from Aquinas on up profoundly condemned it, but I'm aware of what Plato and Aristotle said. Okay, well, obviously the best situation. Is that the answer you expected? Well, it's actually a very good setup for my third question. Obviously we want a situation in which the natural law and the positive law coincide. That way we don't have to get to these sort of messy difficulties with disregarding the positive law and how uncomfortable that makes us all feel. So we want that to be the case. I would suggest to you that following the 14th Amendment, in fact it was the case as regards many of the things that you talk about in your sections on Jim Crow. And it is curious to me that you are relatively silent about one aspect of the 14th Amendment, which is the privileges or immunities clause. And I would suggest that this could have been a vehicle for doing away with a lot of Jim Crow, if not all of it. And so we did have positive law as well as natural law on the side of treating everyone equally without regard to race. And yet it was not employed. And I would ask your thoughts on that. I agree with you on that. I mean, the privileges and immunities clause has been twisted and perverted by the courts so as to permit Jim Crow by arguing that the privileges and immunities clause only applies to the privileges of national citizenship, which doesn't include the right to buy a train ticket and the right to go into a restaurant and the right to sit at a lunch counter. I don't think that's what the 14th Amendment meant. It hasn't been interpreted in the modern era that way, but for 75 years it had been. In my view, it's a defect in the Supreme Court jurisprudence and it visited and facilitated Jim Crow. Look, the only reason we had Jim Crow is not because legislatures enacted it. It was a law in Louisiana, as was so articulately pointed out that you couldn't sell that first class ticket to a black person, even if they wanted to buy it. It was the courts that permitted this to happen because they were enforcing the positivist law, the written-down law, irrespective of whose natural rights it violated. And I have never hesitated, and when I was on the pension to this, I did get reversed a lot to excoriate judges for embracing the natural law no matter what the written-down law said. That's what judges are supposed to do. That's the whole reason we have an independent judiciary to be anti-democratic, to prevent the majority from taking the life, liberty, or property of an unpopular minority. Well, I don't wanna make this too much of an interrogation, so I think I'll close with an anecdote, which is one of the most striking ones to me about the way in which Jim Crow actually was an imposition by state governments. Historian by the name of Jennifer Morse has written about exactly this and how the segregated train cars that became such a symbol of Jim Crow were in fact legislated creations and the streetcar companies hated them and the customers hated them. And the reason that they hated them is because prior to these laws, the cars were segregated into smoking and non-smoking sections. And having to have a smoking car and a non-smoking car and a black car meant a lot of empty cars and it was inefficient and confusing and the customers didn't know where to sit. Well, I wanna smoke, but I'm white, do I sit with the blacks? But then I'm not supposed to and I don't wanna smoke, but I'm black and I don't wanna be around, these people are smoking and it caused all kinds of problems. And in the end, they had to get rid of a voluntary system of separating people into smoking and non-smoking preferences, which wasn't in the law, but was voluntarily enacted by the streetcar companies themselves in favor of this legislatively imposed racial segregation that at the time no one wanted. So, yes, the stories could be multiplied, but that's one that I think really illustrates very well the way in which these policies that are so emblematic of Jim Crow actually were fundamentally and originally imposed by the government. They were not the preferences of many of the people at the time. Thank you, Jason. I invite you to join the discussion now. Raise your hand and we will bring a microphone around to you. Let me start, bring a microphone right down here and then we'll take one here. And meanwhile, Judge, I'll start you with the first question from Damon Root. Is the Constitution a covenant with hell or a glorious liberty document? It's a glorious liberty document with obviously some defects in it, the slave importation clause, and the three fifths clause, the most notable defects in it. But it is for the first time in the history of the world the inverse of the way liberty came about. In the old world, when people struggled and fought for liberty against kings and tyrants, it was power giving liberty. It was those who, by virtue of inheritance or force, reluctantly, who had power, reluctantly parting with some of it to allow liberty. In the American system, from the time Jefferson wrote, all men are created equal. And with the checks and balances, with the states creating the Constitution, it was the opposite of power giving liberty. It was liberty giving power. It was individuals giving liberty to the states, and it was states giving liberty to the central government. For that simple inversion of history alone, not only am I with Garrison, excuse me, not only am I with Frederick Douglass on this, but I would argue it's the greatest document for the preservation of human liberty ever written in the Western world. All right, thank you. All right, we'll take questions now. Let me just remind you that this is a period for questions, not for speeches or further discussion. Question? As Judge Napolitano, I heard the great talk you gave here in 2004 about constitutional chaos, and this one's even more interesting because for five weeks in 1964, I was an office assistant to the lawyer in Jackson, Mississippi, who coordinated all the legal activities, civil rights legal activities in the state. Since then we made a lot of progress on civil rights for minorities, women, even gays. There's one area where I think we've gone way backwards, and that's the fact that there are now more than 10 times as many people in jail for drug crimes as there were in the 60s. I see a lot of parallels between the two movements. I just wonder if you might. Well, I never thought of them as parallel movements. My own views are not hidden on this, and that is that I'm for the absolute legalization of the personal use and possession of recreational drugs for a whole host of reasons, the essence of which is freedom of choice and the right to do to your body and with your body whatever you want, but I never analogized it. Actually a very, very interesting analogy. Analogized it with any other great civil rights movements in the country. There may be, for those who believe that the government has been draconian here, as do I, there may be some glimmers of hope with respect to the legalization of the use of recreational or medicinal drugs that the government has in a Victorian, draconian, thoughtless, expensive, bloody way attempted to keep away from us. I see progress in that direction. It's very difficult, very difficult to send someone to jail because of what they put in their body because they became addicted to it when there was no other crime. It's a, in my view, again we talk about natural law versus positivism, there are two kinds of laws. There's malum and say and malum prohibitum. Malum and say are laws that prohibit behavior because it is wrongful in and of itself like murder or theft or rape. Malum prohibitum are the class of laws that prohibit things that the government wants prohibited irrespective of whether it's inherently wrong like gambling or prostitution or drugs. The fewer malum prohibitum laws we have, the more human freedom we can express and enjoy. Okay, we have a question right here. And then take the mic all the way to the back for the next question. Emile Olforribero, New Cuba Coalition. I would like to hear the comments of the panel. I know of you, Mr. Boas, on some doubts I have. First doubt is, aren't we applying our values? Use your mic. Thank you. Aren't we applying our values of today to what our ancestors did 200 years ago? That's one. And another doubt I have is this. Mr. Root, your Honor, you didn't mention that during the times that the blacks were slaves in the United States, there were more white slaves in the United States than blacks. And not they were servants subject to indenture. In denture. In indenture. No, they would call themselves slaves. Society called themselves them slaves. Now, another thing. Racism and slavery could be equated, but not always. It's a question of circumstances. More white people were taken from Europe to Africa as slaves than the reverse. Okay. Okay, that's three questions. That's enough. Judge? Just a second. Well, very quickly. No, I'm asking their opinion. Find contradictions between our laws of today and the same laws how they were applied. The constitution, the laws they were applied two centuries ago. Could you please, and I think this is a question that you don't consider the most. Could you please thank Mr. Root? Well, the book is not an encyclopedia and it doesn't purport to address all slavery or all evils inflicted in the name of the constitution. It addresses the plight of African Americans and what the government did to them. And yes, of course I have 21st century values even though my values are animated by people like Augustine and Aquinas and John Locke and Thomas Jefferson. This is actually your argument. One of the classic defenses of Abraham Lincoln. Oh, well, he just shared the white racist views of everybody else that was white and in the government in those days. That doesn't justify those views, didn't justify them at the time and it doesn't justify our observation or failure to condemn them from the vantage point of history. Well, you know, when you write a book, you have a limitation of space and time. You also have publishers who make demands on you. I don't apologize for not putting anything in the book and I see that you're very animated by it but this is not a book about white slavery. It's a book about African American treatment at the hands of white governments and how racism permeated that treatment. Another book could be written on the issues that you so passionately raise. Jason, you. Yeah, are we applying our values to what our ancestors did? Yes, what other values should we apply? Historians get asked this question about values all the time and it's when they ask themselves all the time but this does not have to necessarily mean that all history is purely a statement of values. There is such a thing as treating the facts objectively, weighing evidence fairly despite having personal beliefs or values in a greater or more philosophical sense. There is a danger of a conflict there. There's not a necessity of a conflict. It is possible to write a judicious history that nonetheless does speak to the author's own values that is certainly possible and why is this a particularly important topic as opposed to say whites who are taken into slavery because slavery and subsequent racism and its after effects are a much more important part of the African American story than they are of the white story. The experience of whites taken into slavery in the United States is a curiosity. It's not a universal reality for white people and so there is a real story there that people are likely to identify with and to some extent we can still see the effects of racism around us although in a much attenuated sense now and so it does remain historically important and it remains important for understanding America as it exists today in a way that for example the experience of whites taken into slavery doesn't really have the same salience. Damon do you have anything you want to add? It's on. I would just say that there were opponents of slavery at the time so it's not simply a question of our values today. There were founding fathers Alexander Hamilton, Gouverneur Morris, opposed slavery. Frederick Douglass was a slave, was born into slavery and escaped and said you have no right to own me. He wrote this famous letter to his master Thomas Old so there are contemporaries. It's not simply a matter of everyone at the time who thought slavery was great. Lots of people opposed it and so I think historically we can look at their words and draw on them also. So I agree with Jason that of course we apply our values when we're looking at history and we're talking about these stories but there were opponents of slavery at the time for what we're talking about. Well and since nobody else has been too blunt about it let me just say that I don't think that the factual claims made by the questioner are accurate but he's provided me with a research paper here so I'll certainly take a look at it. Okay I called on the person in the back and then please take the microphone here. You can give him the mic, he won't shout until the other guy's finished. Ha ha ha ha. Following the two recent hate murders one of an abortion doctor and the other of a guard at the Holocaust Museum. There were nearly identical remarks made by backers of organizations such as those with which they were affiliated. The one was we don't approve of what he did because it makes us look bad and the other one was we don't approve of what he did because it's bad for our image. And I bring these points up because these are folks who advocate views touching on the issues you raised and by pointing out that the government has been the perpetrator of all this racism for example and that it's been upheld in opposition to natural law. Isn't there the danger that if people act based upon natural law and the government doesn't enforce written law to prevent that that we'll see popular will, that natural law interpreted through popular will in a way that leads to more and not less racism. Well the natural, is this for me to answer? Yeah, the natural law is a frustration of popular will. And the natural law would condemn Dr. Tiller's slaughter of 60,000 babies with the same efficient and passionate zeal with which it would condemn the guy who killed, I don't even know his name, Dr. Tiller in the church. But the natural law would also condemn a government that allowed Dr. Tiller to do what he did. Now I concede that the natural law, any theory taken to extremes can have radical and unpleasant effects. And quite frankly, judges who enforce the natural law to the frustration of the majority with regularity and consistency might find themselves facing impeachment trials because there must generally be public sentiment for great sea changes in our thinking. I don't remember which one of you put the question to me. I think it was Jason about how I would have ruled had Susan B. Anthony come to me. I would have taken my career into my hands by having struck down the law that prohibited women from voting but it was clearly unnatural wrong by any standard and ought to have been wiped away. But yes, you could take any theory. I mean, you could take any religion and if you don't temper it with reason, it becomes fanatical. So if you think that you're saving lives by killing the abortionist, you're violating another natural law command which is that you may not do evil that good may come of it. And taking someone's life is always except in the instance of self-defense, evil. Professor Bernstein. David Bernstein. David Bernstein, George Mason Law School. I've had the chance to at least glance at your book. It looks very interesting, so congratulations. Obviously, like you said, your book is an encyclopedia and can cover everything but one thing I didn't at least notice when I was able to take a quick look at the book was the fact that African-American leadership from Frederick Douglass through Booker T. Washington through the 1930s was basically in favor of limited government, hostile and skeptical of labor unions and certainly of any legislation that gave labor unions any special power and generally individualist and if not quite libertarian, least classical, liberal in nature. By the 1930s though, there was partly an ideological conversion but I think a far-sighted African-American leaders saw that in the new era of big government, having this philosophy and this attitude of individual rights wasn't going to get them anywhere and they actually used the labor movement as a model. And just like the labor movement was able to get the Wagner Act and other special group privileges through the federal government, African-American leaders say if we organize ourselves that way, that's the way in the interest group state that we get ahead and they were right. I think they would have been quite mistaken on behalf of their constituents to hear classical liberalism in the New Deal welfare state. So the question is a lot of conservative and other commentators say that Africa, we need to not let the government look at race and we need to get beyond race and so forth and so on but from the perspective of African-American leaders and Jennifer Morse who was mentioned by Dr. Kuznicki, I heard her once say this at Kato, if the farmers are organizing to get farm stuff, farm subsidies and the elderly organize to get Medicare and Social Security and the defense contractors organized and there are how many thousands of lobbying groups from in the United States, watch African-Americans who are still some of the surrogate society and who are sort of a distinct class be the first ones to disarm and decide, well we just want individual rights and we don't want groups to write any kind of privileges of the class but let everyone else get them. So how do we make an argument or should we make an argument that the government shouldn't take into account race when they do take into account every other kind of possible lobbying group that there is? Well because race is an immutable characteristic of birth. I mean for the same reason that the government shouldn't discriminate against women or gays or anybody else that experiences an immutable characteristic of birth, the government, that is removed from the government's armament. The government can say this particular organization and lobbying group is not something I want to, that I find appealing whether it's to use your example farmers or defense contractors, those are policy judgments that the government makes but the government can't say I'm going to reject the plea of these people because they're black or they're gay or they're female because they're characteristics that are part of one's humanity in which the government must recognize and can't use as a stumbling block, as a sword, or as a shield. There are many aspects of the history of African-American, the slow, torturous, march toward freedom which are not covered in the book. Remember my own bias is that of a lawyer and that of a former judge. So I write the book through that prism but there are great stories and both of my commentators here today alluded to them as did you professor of strong deep libertarian thinking amongst African-American leadership before Thurgood Marshall and those folks came along and started to score victories in the courts. Hi, Judge, I'm a criminal defense attorney from one of the most segregated cities in the nation, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. We make the news several times a month and I'm also working on my PhD in anthropology so I look at things from a slightly different angle and I think there's a question in here somewhere but judges make me nervous. So. I'm looking at you as making you nervous. Your authority and knowledge. But basically. I need to get over that as a lawyer. Basically, it's been almost 400 years and a quote from St. Thomas More's Utopia comes to mind in that and also as an anthropologist. I think the Constitution is a beautiful thing but the kids I represent, I see none of them from the get-go stand a chance and I think of that quote about the law not being just or practical when you have a population of people in one culture dominated by the rules and the Constitution from another. Where can it really be applied equally when there's an economic environmental environment going on that's so prohibitive to access? I don't know how judges in Wisconsin become judges. I'm going to guess since 37 states elect them and that since Wisconsin came into being the behest of progressives, the judges are elected. And in my view, that's wrong. I come from a system where judges are appointed. I had a lifetime appointment. There are only three states where the state judges get lifetime appointments. Interestingly, three of the most liberal states in the union, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New Jersey. Federal article three judges, not bankruptcy judges or administrative law judges but the judges whose decisions you read who bind and restrain the other two branches of the government are life tenure judges so they can be immune from that. I mean, judges must bend over backwards and strain at a nat in order to remove all vestige of racism not only from their own thinking but from what's happening in the courtroom. So much so that it's better that the guilty be set free but that innocent be punished or that racism animate law enforcement. And it should come as a surprise to no one in this room. Racism truly animates law enforcement more than any other aspect of the government with which I've had any personal involvement. And judges must be scrupulous and painstaking to prevent that from happening. I know it's difficult but they must endeavor mightily for that. Otherwise they're violating their oath to uphold the core American values of freedom and equality.