YouSaid · the spoken record

Geoffrey Stone

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72
first
2017-06-08
most recent
2017-06-08
sittings or episodes
1
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podcast

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  1. “That was also pretty serendipitous when I was clerking for Justice Brennan, I was deliberating between two possible jobs for the following year. One was working for Senator Edward Kennedy. Because I was particularly interested in the possibility of being involved in a presidential campaign, and I thought then that he might run for president in 76. He didn't, of course, but that was my hope or expectation. And the other was working for the Center for Law and Social Progress, which is a public interest law firm in Washington. And I was choosing between those two when one of my former professors at the University of Chicago, Owen Fis, called me up, and Owen was then the chair of the Faculty Appointments Committee, and he said to me, Jeff, you should come out and interview for a job here at Chicago. And I said, Professor Fiss, I really am not interested in being an academic. And even if I were ever interested in it, it's not something I'm interested in now. And he was very persistent. And he called three or four times over the course of the next two weeks and tried to persuade me that I was wrong. And I'd never been very good at saying no to people. And so after the third or fourth call, I finally said, okay, I'll come do it. And as soon as I got off the phone, I said,”

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

  2. “Back into that really awful and horrendous world in which women were dying and were suffering serious medical injuries with abortions performed illegally by people who are not qualified to do them.”

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

  3. “Some states would then legalize abortion as a matter of state law, as four of them had before Roeade, and the majority of the states would not do so if you think about the Electoral College and the Blue States and Red States that would correlate pretty well with that. And so for women who lived in those states where abortion was legal, they would continue to be able to have access to abortion. But for those who lived in states where abortion was illegal, particularly for poor and minority women who couldn't afford to travel to the states where abortion is legal, they would be thrown back into the world of self-abortion and back alley abortion. And that would be hundreds of thousands of women a year, approximately a million women a year today have abortion, and approximately one out of every three women has an abortion during their lifetimes today. This would render a substantial percentage of those unlawful. And would, again, put us”

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

  4. “I think that With another Trump appointment to the court if he gets to replace Ginsburg Briar or Kennedy, the three oldest justices on the court, I think there's a very serious possibility that five justices would vote to overrule Roe v. Wade. They might not do it immediately, but I think it's pretty likely. The decisions that justices, the opinions that justices, Roberts and Alito and Thomas have written in the abortion cases they've decided are so vehemently opposed to the right that was recognized in Row. And I have to believe that Gorsuch probably shares that view and that if Trump gets another nomination, it will be someone like Alito or Gorsich. I would be surprised if they don't overrule Roe v. Wade. And I think that would be tragic for the nation.”

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

  5. “Right. Once the fetus can be removed from the woman and then live, the woman did not then have a right to abort the fetus unless the abortion was necessary to save the health or life of the woman. And the court understood that with medical technology over time that the point of viability would move forward. And my guess is that the justices who decided Roe would have basically said that the right is to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, not to kill a baby who could be born. And so I think the notion that the viability moves back in time is inevitable scientifically. And it's still not nearly close enough to the beginning where it becomes a major obstacle. But at some point, it may be that you see legislature.”

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

  6. “While the court in Row basically said that a woman's right to terminate an unwanted pregnancy ends with viability that is once”

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

  7. “The repeal of the earlier statute and to go back to the nineteenth century law that made abortion illegal. And Nelson Rockefeller vetoed the second act basically saying Republican, important to note, basically saying that the substantial majority of citizens of New York believe abortion should be legal. This second legislation is being driven clearly by religion, and in the nation that's dedicated to the separation of church and state, that should not be a basis for taking away what should be the rights of individual women. But the point is at that point it installed, and the court was aware of that. And so Ginsburg's kind of optimistic notion that more and more states would have come around in this way, I think is unrealistic.”

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

  8. “It's a political judgment. It's a judgment that the court should have gone in a very incremental manner because it would not have created the consequences that she thinks Rogue created. I disagree with that. I disagree with it in two respects. First, I think that it's naive to think that state legislatures would have suddenly in large numbers come around to legalizing abortion. A couple of states had done so. Four states had done so between 1970 and 1972. But that came to a rapid halt when the pushback against those state legislative decisions began. In fact, in one of those states, New York, the legislature basically legalized abortion in the first trimester, and then Catholics and others in the state resisted. And the state legislature voted to overturn”

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

  9. “Yes, that's Well, Ginsburg has taken the view that the court should have gone very slowly, it should have decided Roe v. Wade much more narrowly. It should have allowed the issue of abortion to play out over the years in the state legislatures and slowly in the courts, and that if that had happened, we wouldn't have had the moral majority, we wouldn't have had the pushback against abortion that we later had, and all this was basically triggered by the court's bold decision in Roe v. Wade. I disagree.”

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

  10. “had been legal historically and in the United States up until the late nineteenth century, and that it was really an anomaly that we had criminalized abortion, that at the time of the Constitution was drafted, abortion was perfectly legal. And the second thing I think he came to understand much better and to educate his fellow justices about what it was like for women in the world in which abortion was legal. That was still very secret. It was illegal and it was shameful. And women didn't talk about those experiences. But as Blackman read about it and began to talk about it with the fellow justices, they all decided that this needed to be resolved now. And they were not prepared to sort of mess around with this for the next 15 years, leaving it vague, while every year a million women were driven into Back Alley abortions and self-abortions. So it was interesting to watch how the justices came together in that case.”

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

  11. “Was involved in the case. And to leave open all the other questions about abortion. And Blackman originally wrote an opinion that basically struck down the Texas statute on the ground that it was vague because what it said is an abortion was legal if a doctor found that it was necessary to save the life of the woman. And Blackwind's original approach was to say, well, what does necessary mean? That's vague. And we shouldn't really put a doctor to the test of a possible criminal liability unless the state spells out in more detail what necessary means. And that would have been a completely forgettable decision that nobody would have ever heard of. And what was interesting is they decided not to resolve the case on that ground, to rehear it the following year, the year I was a law clerk. And that summer, Blackman went up to the Mayo Clinic where he'd been on the board and educated himself about abortion. And when he came back, he really explained to his fellow justices two critical facts. One was that abortion”

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

  12. “Right. Harry Blackman. And one of the things people today don't understand, they think of Roe v. Wade as a sort of radical left-wing decision. But three of the four Nixon appointees joined Roe v. Wade at the time. And the justices themselves knew it was a difficult legal issue, but they didn't think of it as a kind of fractious political issue at the moment. There was a substantial majority of Americans favored legalizing abortion. And traditionally, the Republican Party had been more pro-choice than Democrat Party because the Democrats had basically included most Catholics in the country. So it was not seen as divisive in the way it later became. But it was a fascinating case to watch because when they first argued the case and Berger assigned the opinion to Blackman, he expected Blackman to write a very narrow opinion. And really just to invalidate the Texas statute.”

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

  13. “Well, it was a period of transition. Nixon had appointed four new justices in the two years before that. And for justices like Brennan, for whom I clerked, it was a difficult time because he had been in the majority in the Warren Court for much of his career. And suddenly he found himself often in dissent on cases that he cared for a great deal.”

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

  14. “And my girlfriend at the time was transferring to Northwestern, and I figured, well, I might as well be in the same city as her, so I'll go to Chicago. And the night before I left New York to drive out to Chicago to start law school, she called and broke up with me. So it was not an auspicious beginning”

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

  15. “No, no, there was only one more year of grad confirmation. It could have been, and it likely seemed it would be only one year. I then got lucky in the draft lottery and got a good number. And so I wound up being able to finish law school. And if you're at the Chicago to go to law school, by the way, also serendipitously, after I decided to apply, I applied to the Harvard Yale Stanford, Columbia, Chicago.”

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

  16. “And everybody said to me, even if you have only one year of law school, that will stand you in good stead. The intellectual analytical skills you'll gain from that, no matter what you wind up doing later, that would be a good investment. So I decided to go to law school.”

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

  17. “My dad thought it would be really cool for me to be a stockbroker. And that's why I went to Wharton. I knew nothing about in those days, you know, you didn't know a lot about colleges. And he said to me, this is a good thing for you to do. And I said, okay, I'll do that. But I didn't particularly like the business courses. And I had taken an archaeology course, which I really liked. And I went to my professor and I said, would it make sense for me to start a PhD program next year in archaeology, given the fact that after a year, I would probably wind up having to make a choice between Vietnam and Canada. And she said, no, it probably didn't make any sense. One year of a PhD program in archaeology wasn't going to stand you in good stead. So they had to figure out what to do. And both of my roommates at the time were going to go to law school. There were a couple of very good TV shows about lawyers at the time.”

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

  18. “Yes, a momentous year. It was the last year was the last year of graduate student deferments from the draft. So all of the guys I knew were going to go to graduate school, at least for the year. And then we'd have to figure out whether to go to Canada or Vietnam. And I'd been in Wharton, so I studied business, but I had not really been enamored of it.”

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

  19. “It would be interesting to see them. I'd rather see his tax returns, but I would take his transcripts. I'm sure they're not sterling.”

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

  20. “I was not cribbing from it, although many people have pointed out to me that if you look at the graduation program, he and I are very near each other because Trump and Stone aren't that far apart in the alphabet and Wharton wasn't that big. I've never met the guy.”

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

  21. “From Russia. And my father's family name was not Stone, it was Zagovsky. They changed it when he, the youngest of three brothers, turned twenty one to assimilate better. And my grandfather on one side was a boxer and then a cab driver and then worked on the railroad, New York Central Railroad. And my grandfather on the other side ran a luncheonette. And my dad flew in a B twenty nine during World War II. So I was born in the Bronx, and then eventually grew up on Long Island in Greatneck and went to Penn. I was a classmate at Wharton with Donald Trump. I did not know him. I'd never heard of him.”

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

  22. “No, definitely not. My parents lived in the Bronx, and their parents, my grandparents, came over here in the late 19th century as little kids.”

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