YouSaid · the spoken record

Geoffrey Stone

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2017-06-08
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2017-06-08
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  1. “On a lot of issues. Exactly. But ever since then, presidents have been more focused on appointing justices with an ideology that they want to see on the court. In the past, they tended more often to appoint justices because they knew them well personally and had respect for them as individuals and were less focused on the ideology of the justices. But that's changed since 1969 on both sides.”

    2017-06-08 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 154 - Geoffrey Stone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “This began in the modern era with Richard Nixon, where he basically wanted to appoint justices who at that time were thought of as very conservative, although today they'd be moderate to moderate liberals.”

    2017-06-08 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 154 - Geoffrey Stone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Right. And what McConnell did, I think, was truly unconscionable and destructive to the judicial system of the United States. And I do think that the court going forward is going to face an enormous challenge because it can see where it's headed if it doesn't figure out internally how to avoid that. And that will pose a real challenge to Chief Judges Roberts to see if he can find a way to get the justices either to avoid taking cases that will avoid them on partisan grounds or to decide those cases on very narrow grounds that are not going to be divided on partisan lines. But there's a real danger that the court is going to lose a lot of the credibility that it has had and that the nation depends upon. It depends upon the idea that justices are not simply political hacks who were voting the way the president appointed them wanted.”

    2017-06-08 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 154 - Geoffrey Stone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Yes, I think that we now see a court that is more divided on the basis of the president who appointed the party of the president, who appointed the individual nominees than ever before. And that's not healthy for the nation. In the past, there were always Republican-appointed justices and William Brennan, who tended to be fairly liberal. They're suit as moderate in my view. He's only liberal by contemporary standards where these definitions have changed so much. And Byron White appointed by now we're moving increasingly to a world in which the justices are divided. And that was partly why Obama's nomination of Garland was so important. Because Garland was basically slightly liberal, but basically moderate. And highly regarded.”

    2017-06-08 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 154 - Geoffrey Stone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “In ways that gay rights do. Right. And there's lots of things other people do that we regard as unwise or even immoral or different from our religion that we don't make a huge fuzz over. But abortion's different if you believe it is the murder of an onboard child. And so I don't think that this hypothetical court will be so quick to overrule Lawrence or O'Brugefell. I don't think, however, they will extend those decisions. So to the extent there are laws that allow discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, I'd be surprised that that hypothetical court would invalidate those laws. And similarly with respect to the rights of transgender persons, I would be surprised if that hypothetical court would invalidate laws that allowed that discrimination. So I think what we've seen on this front is that these decisions are probably going to remain in place, even if Trump has another nomination, but that they won't be extended to other areas in which the current court, as now constituted, would extend them.”

    2017-06-08 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 154 - Geoffrey Stone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “And the AIDS forced gays to come out of the closet most fundamentally. Where with abortion, my guess is most of the people who have fiercely opposing views on abortion, even today, Don't know they know people. That people who know them would not tell them that because it would be so horrifying. And so they still live in a world in which they don't know that they're exposed to people who've had abortions. And the other thing, I think, is that for those reasons, they all...”

    2017-06-08 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 154 - Geoffrey Stone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “And sometimes it's even their own children or their neighbors' children or their co-worker. And nobody knew that thirty, forty years ago. These people never imagined they knew anybody who was gay. But suddenly they've discovered that they know people who are gay. And that's changed their views.”

    2017-06-08 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 154 - Geoffrey Stone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “And for people who sincerely hold that belief, it's easy for me to understand why they are committed to prohibiting that activity. That is pretty fundamental. Now my own view is they're entitled to have that belief, but they're not entitled to impose that belief because it's their religious faith upon people who don't share it. But at the same time, I understand that they do feel it and I understand the power that it holds for them. With respect to gay rights, I think we've seen in this world of change that the pushback against these decisions Lawrence V Texas and O'Brugefell on same-sex marriage has been much more modest than the pushback against abortion. And part of the reason for that, I think, is that people who are opposed to gay rights have found to their surprise that they know people who are gay.”

    2017-06-08 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 154 - Geoffrey Stone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “On the issue of gay rights, I think that the Supreme Court's decisions there, insofar as they are currently in place, are less likely to be overturned by a court with another conservative justice added to it than the abortion decisions. And the reason I say that is twofold. First, the objection to the abortion decisions really derives from the view on the part of many Americans, largely for religious reasons, that abortion is the murder of an onborn child.”

    2017-06-08 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 154 - Geoffrey Stone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Absolutely, absolutely. And so that got me curious both about the history before that driving me in writing this book eventually all the way back to the Greeks and the Romans. And also how did we get to the 50s, in effect, and what happened in the United States from the time of the framing until the era that I was assuming was the norm. So the book covers a lot of that history. Then the second part of the book looks at what the Supreme Court did and how it is transformed, along with social movements and changes in society, our attitudes about these issues.”

    2017-06-08 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 154 - Geoffrey Stone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Was doing in all these areas of the law. So I started this by just basically being curious about that. And what I learned to my astonishment was that the world of the framers was much more like the world of the present with respect to these issues than I had ever imagined. And that, as I said earlier, abortion was legal and common at that time. There were no laws against obscenity. There were no laws against contraception. And they had a pretty pursuit of happiness attitude about sexuality. Nothing at all like what.”

    2017-06-08 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 154 - Geoffrey Stone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “So usually when academics decide to write a book, it's more or less at the end of a process. They've written a bunch of articles, they've given lectures about the subject, they've taught about it, they've given workshops and so on, and writing the book is the culmination of that process. For me, about 10 years ago, I started thinking about this really out of curiosity. What drove me to begin thinking about writing this book was basically my naive view about the history of attitudes about sex was that they were probably more or less like the attitudes in the United States in the 1950s. Pretty prudish by nature, and that it was the sexual revolution that led the Supreme Court to begin rethinking questions of obscenity and contraception and abortion and gay rights and so on. And I was curious, what would the framers have thought about this, right? They would have thought this was crazy, what the Supreme Court”

    2017-06-08 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 154 - Geoffrey Stone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “The First Amendment on campaign finance, interpreting the Equal Protection Clause under affirmative action, these were all situations where a true originalist, in my view, would find that campaign finance laws are unconstitutional. I'm sorry, that campaign finances are constitutional. The framers never imagined that. They had no view about that at all. They would have never invalidated the affirmative action. They never thought about affirmative action. They had no view on this. With respect to the Second Amendment, they clearly understood it as about militias, not about ordinary people owning guns in a world in which there were police departments. So I think in the case like those, Galia clearly violated his tenets of originalism because he couldn't bring himself to be true to it. And as a consequence, he basically undermined the credibility of originalism itself.”

    2017-06-08 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 154 - Geoffrey Stone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “The framers purportedly wanted the courts to do. But the framers who were men of the Enlightenment, they were men, did not want courts to interpret and apply the Constitution only in the way in which they, in their world, would have imagined it. They understood that the world changes, society changes. We come to have greater understandings. The last thing they would have wanted is justices to interpret the Constitution from the standpoint of a narrow originalist view that tries to figure out what it was they wanted. The other reason I think Scullya failed is that he could not really bring himself to be true to originalism, and that is frequently when there was a conflict between what a pure originalist would do and what a political conservative would want. Scalia erred on the side of what a conservative would want. So on issues like interpreting the Second Amendment on guns.”

    2017-06-08 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 154 - Geoffrey Stone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Right. Well, not even the intent of the framework. Not even the text, but rather what the framer is understood the text means. Basically. And so a fundamental problem with originalism is that it's internally inconsistent. What it tries to do is to do”

    2017-06-08 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 154 - Geoffrey Stone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “And I think he has failed in that regard. I think there are academics who still attempt to make sense out of originalism and occasionally a judge or justice does so, but it has not won the day in the legal community or in the judiciary. And I think that's true for several reasons. Some built into originalism, and some do to Scalia's own failings.”

    2017-06-08 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 154 - Geoffrey Stone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “So Scali and I were colleagues for, I forget, six or seven years, and we both taught constitutional law. We knew each other quite well. We had kids together in the universities, laboratory schools. So we were both social and professional friends. We disagreed about pretty much everything when it came to the law, but it was almost always collegial and friendly, always friendly. And Scalia was not a great teacher. He was disappointing. I think he did not devote enough of his energy to teaching. He himself, once, a couple of years ago, he and I had dinner about maybe five years ago, and he expressed regret that he had not paid enough attention to teaching, felt that he hadn't really done a service to his students. But he was extremely smart and interesting guy. As a justice, I think he He failed in some fundamental ways. You know, Scalia's”

    2017-06-08 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 154 - Geoffrey Stone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Well, I think Justice Roberts gets more credit than he deserves on these lines, frankly. I think people look at the Affordable Care Act decision and say, see, this is what he does. But this is not what he does. On almost every ideological issue, he has voted pretty much party line, whether it's campaign finance or guns or affirmative action or the Voting Rights Act. So I don't think Roberts is quite the middleman that he's sometimes cracked up to be. But on this issue, I think he is likely to move that way. I think he's likely to really work very hard to find something more than a five-form majority.”

    2017-06-08 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 154 - Geoffrey Stone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “For the Supreme Court, I think it poses a terrific challenge. I don't think the justices will want to decide this case, 5-4, divided along partisan lines. They've divided 5-4 along partisan lines on many issues, but this is one where I think they will be loath to do that. Therefore, I suspect they will try to find a very narrow and technical basis for resolving the case one way or the other in which they can get more than a five majority.”

    2017-06-08 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 154 - Geoffrey Stone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Exactly. So the question, the central argument is that this executive order is driven by a hostility on the basis of religious belief and that that violates the free exercise and establishment clause of the First Amendment. And the question is to what extent a court is willing to say that because the president made some statements on a campaign trail, that that is the actual subjective motivation for the executive order. And so far, the judges below have tended to say we can't blink reality here. This is too obvious in our face to pretend it's not the case.”

    2017-06-08 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 154 - Geoffrey Stone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Well, I'm not an expert on immigration law, but on the constitutional issue about the role of the First Amendment, in this case religious freedom. It poses a very tricky question. Basically, courts do not like to invalidate government action on the ground that it was motivated by an impermissible purpose. They're always uncomfortable second guessing the actual subjective motivations of legislators or executive officials and so on. So like there's”

    2017-06-08 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 154 - Geoffrey Stone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Exactly. And I think the Republicans in the Congress would be extremely anxious about alienating that base. So I don't think we will wind up going down that road. But I do think that Comey's testimony will be fascinating. And I trust Jim Comey. I mean, even when I disagree with him. And he, by the way, is conservative, and he was a student. He was someone who was a member of the Federal Society, and he and I disagreed about lots of issues, but I always had great respect for his judgment and for his integrity. And I'll be very curious to see what he says.”

    2017-06-08 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 154 - Geoffrey Stone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Well I will believe what Jim Comey says. As I said, if there's anything I come to think about Comey over the years, it's that he has an unimpeachable integrity. And whatever he says, I think will be his understanding of the truth. I think that's clear. What that will result in remains, obviously, to be seen. I would be very surprised personally if the Republican-controlled House were to impeach Donald Trump. I have to wonder whether they'd be happy to be rid of him at this point, but I don't know if there'd be ready to go down that route.”

    2017-06-08 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 154 - Geoffrey Stone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “So Jim was someone I got to know fairly well. He took at least one or two of my courses. And he was very impressive. He was obviously smart. But the thing that struck me most about Comey was he had a genuine sense of integrity. And I don't know exactly how or why that came across, but it did. And I respected him. I respected his judgment. And if you'd ask me about him at that time, I'm quite sure integrity is a word I would have used. I don't remember why exactly. I had that sense of him. But he exuded that. And I still believe that that's the case for Jim Comey. I don't know that he made all the right decisions during the election, although I have not talked to him about this, although I have my own theory about why he may. Have done what he did”

    2017-06-08 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 154 - Geoffrey Stone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Some percentage of them will go out and do bad things. And that was a very troubling risk with respect to Guantanamo. And I think there were some members of the group who felt that Obama was being overly cautious about the recidivism risk, the risk that some of these people, if released, would go out and commit additional terrorist acts. And the president was basically taking the view that that was something we needed to avoid, I won't say at all costs, but he was waiting that very heavily. And partly for national security reasons, and partly frankly, for political reasons.”

    2017-06-08 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 154 - Geoffrey Stone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “What I remember is the most interesting moment in it was along the lines you suggested where the central question was not do you follow good procedures? Obama was clearly in support of due process and putting in place proper procedures. The critical question was when do you release someone? At what point are you sufficiently satisfied that they do not pose a danger, that you're willing to release them? And this is the same problem that the criminal justice system has all the time. We know that a certain percentage of people who are released from prison become recidivists and they go out and they rob they steal or they kill they rape and you don't ever want to see that happen. So you've got to strike the balance of how do you weigh these risks of on the one hand being fair to people who would not be recidivists and giving them their freedom at the same time you know that there is a risk”

    2017-06-08 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 154 - Geoffrey Stone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “to the nation and not to focus quite as much on the risks to civil liberties and privacy. And so all of the impetus is towards discounting the civil liberties concerns and overweighting the national security concerns. So I think that it's really critical that there be constant oversight and new people looking at it. One of the things I found is even in the four or five months that I was doing this, I felt that happening to me, that I was beginning to get so much more aligned with we've got to keep this country safe, that you begin erring in that direction. So I think that having organizations like this review group of a group of five people coming in from different perspectives on a regular basis, different people coming in on a regular basis, charged with looking at this objectively and critically and making recommendations that are taken seriously.”

    2017-06-08 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 154 - Geoffrey Stone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Identifying potential terrorists thwarting terrorist plots around the world, not just in the United States. No doubt about that. On the other hand, I think that it's imperative that there be constant and vigilant oversight. Of these programs. Because the temptation when you're inside this world is to think about the dangers”

    2017-06-08 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 154 - Geoffrey Stone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Well, I do think that extraordinary measures are necessary, at least in the realm of foreign intelligence surveillance, to keep American safe. We reviewed a range of different programs, some of which did not pay off that much, but others of which clearly did. Paying off.”

    2017-06-08 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 154 - Geoffrey Stone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “To a greater extent, some of the concerns about privacy and civil liberties. And we made a total of 46 recommendations in our report, most of which have been adopted, either by President Obama or by Congress in the USA Freedom Act. And interestingly, by the way, the NSA's director, General Keith Alexander, who, when he saw the list of people on the review group, and he saw my name on it, and I guess he was briefed about who I was as ACLU type person, he basically said to one of his colleagues, what the hell is he doing here? This is a nightmare. And over the time, we came to have great respect to one another. And in the end, we wrote an op-ed together that called for Congress to enact legislation that put serious constraints on some of these programs. So that gave a sense of how really remarkable the experience was.”

    2017-06-08 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 154 - Geoffrey Stone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “I was surprised at the extent to which there was serious oversight from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, from the Department of Justice, a little bit less impressed by the oversight from the Senate and House Intelligence Committees. But I found that the NSA was an organization that was exercising the authority that it had been given by the three branches of government and had been doing so in a very conscientious, not perfect, but very conscientious manner. And the real problem we concluded as a group was not that the NSA had run amok. The problem was that some of the programs that they've been authorized to do needed to be refined and that there was a better balance between privacy and civil liberties on the one hand and national security on the other that could be struck in implementing these programs so as to enable them to be effective while at the same time minimizing”

    2017-06-08 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 154 - Geoffrey Stone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “With Microsoft, with various other companies, with the ACLU, with other privacy and civil liberties groups, getting all the different perspectives on these programs. And when this began, when I first flew to DC for the first meeting, my assumption was that what had happened here is the NSA had run amok and that it was putting in place a series of surveillance programs without any authorization, without any oversight, and that the task of the review group was going to be to basically swap them down to. Rein them in, right? And to my surprise, I discovered it was quite different than that. What I discovered is that the NSA was quite careful. It was very professional. They were basically scientists, technologists, and military types.”

    2017-06-08 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 154 - Geoffrey Stone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Well, there were five members of the review group, and we came from very different perspectives and backgrounds. And when we first met with the president in the Situation Room, he basically said to us, I need for you to be completely direct and candid and objective and help us understand how these programs operate well and how they can be improved and what the problems are and what the challenges are and so on. So we charged us basically to be completely direct and open with him and with the nation. And we spent the next four or five months totally absorbed in this world. And it was a fascinating experience. We basically met pretty much every day with the NSA, the CIA, the FBI, Homeland Security, with the Senate and House Intelligence Committees, with Google, with Facebook.”

    2017-06-08 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 154 - Geoffrey Stone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Including serving in the state legislature. And he taught constitutional law, initially just one course, and then eventually three courses. It was very successful teacher. And he was somebody we really cherished as a part of our community and still hoped to get him back in the next couple of years in some capacity. That would be great.”

    2017-06-08 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 154 - Geoffrey Stone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “Obama come and be a fellow in the law government program, give him a chance to spend some time at the law school, give us a chance to get to know him. And so he came out, I interviewed him, was very impressed. He was very poised. He was very impressive. My secretary, in fact, after he left, said to me, you know, he's going to be governor of Illinois someday, which is about the one thing he hasn't yet been, still might be, still might be. And so we gave that offer to Obama, and he then wound up spending, I think, 12 years at the law school while doing other things at the same time.”

    2017-06-08 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 154 - Geoffrey Stone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “So when I was dean of the law school here, we brought Barack Obama to the law school. He was then a student at the Harvard Law School. He was president at the Harvard Law Review. And one of my colleagues, Mike McConnell, had published a article in the Harvard Law Review and had been very impressed by the work that Obama had done as an editor. And he brought his name to our attention as a possible faculty appointment down the road. And so Douglas Baird, my colleague who was chair of the faculty appointments committee, then contacted some people at Harvard and found out that Obama was highly regarded. And to our surprise, he was not going to be a law clerk. He was actually coming to Chicago with Michelle to work here in the city of Chicago and that he was working on a book at the time. And I had just created a program in law and government at the law school. And so we thought maybe it would be interesting to have”

    2017-06-08 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 154 - Geoffrey Stone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “the government to suppress speech on the theory that the speech might cause bad things to happen, and then with hindsight, realized that it made a mistake, that it was basically undermining democracy by suppressing speech because it might conceivably have bad effects.”

    2017-06-08 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 154 - Geoffrey Stone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “One of the ironies about the reactions to the speakers that students don't like is that it gives them far more attention than they otherwise would have. Basically, if the students allowed these people to come to campus and didn't make a fuss over it, they'd stop coming to campus because it's not worth their time. What they get out of it is the front-page headlines. And so there's a self-defeating part of the strategy that I wish the students would figure out. In terms of the terrorist speech, basically the Supreme Court has said, and it took it 50 years to get to this point, of making a series of mistakes, it finally came to the point of saying that you can't restrict even speech that calls upon others to commit crimes unless there's a clear and present danger that those crimes will occur. And it got to that point by over half century of experience in which it kept”

    2017-06-08 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 154 - Geoffrey Stone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “People rarely heard truly hateful expression mainstream media never would have carried it in a locker room you might hear somebody say something really awful but basically it was pretty much on the sidelines today it's much more pervasive and I think that's both a problem for the targets of that speech because they feel themselves inundated by it and I think it's also something which students who are not themselves the target of the speech but who have friends who are the targets of it are empathetic about and saying Why should they have to hear this stuff? This is terrible and they they and I share their sense that that's not a good thing but censorship in a university is not the solution to it”

    2017-06-08 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 154 - Geoffrey Stone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “It's very concerning to me. It's really the first time in American history where students are the ones who are demanding censorship. Historically, and there have been lots of instances in our history in which universities have censored potential speakers during the McCarthy era, during World War I, during the late 19th century, when the university refused to invite people who criticized major donors during the Darwin era, debates over evolution and creationism. But students have always been the defenders of free speech. This is unique in that sense. I understand why they are upset and angry, why they feel marginalized. I think social media has exacerbated this dramatically, and I think that's a reality. I think when you and I grew up,”

    2017-06-08 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 154 - Geoffrey Stone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “Exactly, and they have the right to protest, they have the right to object to the fact that you invited particular speakers, that you exercised your discretion to do that, they don't have a right to do is to disrupt the event so as to prevent the speaker and the people who want to hear the speaker from engaging in that activity. That's what I think is prohibited. But certainly students and others are completely free to say, you know, we think that the IOP has made a terrible mistake by inviting this person, and they're free to say that. They're free to argue that. Right. And part of the debate is who should we invite, right? How do we decide who to invite? You make choices all the time. And some of them are wise and some of them are less wise. And can advise you and argue that you should make certain choices. But in the end, they can't tell you what you can do.”

    2017-06-08 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 154 - Geoffrey Stone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “Justice Stewart said. Sunday they know it when I see it. Nothing that you described, in my view, comes close to justifying prohibiting a speaker to come onto campus, as much as one might dislike Trump and dislike the things that Trump said. Again, the university has no responsibility to invite Corey Lewandowski or Donald Trump or Sean Spicer. That's up to the IOP. It's up to the different student organizations. Well, and nor do students.”

    2017-06-08 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 154 - Geoffrey Stone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “or that it otherwise is directly incompatible with the functioning of the university, but basically the university may not tolerate the restriction on speech because the ideas are thought by people to be offensive or odious. And one of the interesting thing about the report is we wrote it very much for the University of Chicago. The first five paragraphs or so, which about half the report, talk about her own history as an institution. And in the time since we finished the report, it's been adopted by several dozen colleges and universities across the country, including places like Princeton and Columbia and University of Minnesota, University of Wisconsin, they figured out that they could just lop off the first five paragraphs and make the University of Chicago kind of disappear and then adopt the substantive provisions of the statement as their own. So it's had a real impact, which is very satisfying.”

    2017-06-08 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 154 - Geoffrey Stone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “To allow all ideas to be tested and to be challenged and to be defended, that we know from our own experience as university and as a society that things that people believed in the past have come to be rejected over time because we were allowed to question and challenge them, even when prior generations would have regarded them as absolutely unquestionable. And so basically what the report says is that is at the core of what a university is, and that therefore any person has the freedom to express whatever ideas they wish, however offensive, odious, and problematic they may be to others, that universities do have the responsibility to regulate speech in certain circumstances, speech that defames another person in a false manner or that constitutes a genuine threat or that reveals conflict.”

    2017-06-08 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 154 - Geoffrey Stone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “From its very founding, in its commitment to free speech during the communist era, for example, President Robert Mayard Hutchins defended the right of a student organization to invite the head of the Communist Party of the United States.”

    2017-06-08 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 154 - Geoffrey Stone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “So President Robert Zimmer, noting that issues had begun to arise several years ago at colleges and universities across the country involving free speech issues and disinvitations of speakers, protests of speakers that disrupted the events, thought it would be useful for Chicago to have a statement of our own about the commitment to free speech of the University of Chicago. And Zimmer asked me to chair a faculty committee to draft those principles, and it was a committee that consisted of seven very distinguished faculty members from across the country. And after consulting with students, with faculty, with administrators, and with people at other universities, we wrote a fairly brief three-page report that drew very heavily on the history of the University of Chicago, because Chicago has been, I have to say, exemplary.”

    2017-06-08 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 154 - Geoffrey Stone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “And so I came back, but even then I didn't think I was going to have a career as an academic. I came back thinking this is interesting, and I'm really curious now, and I'll do it for three or four years, and then I go back and do what I'm really going to do with my career later. And then it turns out I fell in love with it.”

    2017-06-08 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 154 - Geoffrey Stone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “And all of this was because I didn't want a job. I wasn't really interested in getting a job. And I was going to have fun. And I went there and I did all this stuff and I was disagreeable and argumentative and presented this ridiculous thesis. And I remember getting on the plane to fly back to DC and thought, I can't believe I blew it. I had a great time. This was terrific. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I should be thinking about it. And then to my astonishment, two weeks later, Dean Phil Neal called me up and offered me a job on the faculty. And as you suggested, what I hadn't realized is that I had hit upon exactly the right strategy to get a job at the University of Chicago. And had I done what I would have done had I wanted the job, which has been a nights boy and agreed with everybody, I never would have been hired.”

    2017-06-08 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 154 - Geoffrey Stone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “Or as a professor. I completely misunderstood that. And we had to give a presentation to the entire faculty as appointments candidates still do. And I decided to pick a topic that was going to be really in your face. So I presented on the thesis that heroin addicts have a constitutional right to purchase and possess heroin.”

    2017-06-08 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 154 - Geoffrey Stone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “Damn, I can't believe I'd make the news. Why did I agree to this? So I decided since I was going to do this, I was not going to be a good boy. And so I decided that in the office interviews with faculty members, I would be disagreeable, argumentative, tell people what I thought, no holds barred. I didn't want to talk anyway.”

    2017-06-08 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 154 - Geoffrey Stone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source