she would be my researcher but she thought she would have connections. but when we met in moscow and talked, she was excited, as excited about the story as i was and agree to put her courage on and work with me as a researcher. so it was really so lucky. >> how much of your book addresses the current situation with the trademark suit or effort that's making, and what is the basis, i'm curious just from a business point or legal point, what is the basis of the family given that the brand was literally sold in the earlier as you mentioned, and what you think is going to happen with the current litigation? >> well, that particular piece of litigation actually was settled in 2006 . .

it is actually fascinating. one chief claim of vladimir, his son who escaped russia and license the brand did not have a right to do that because he had already sold his shares in the business to his brother which he had done before the revolution.

but that brother died. 2 of the other brothers died and because he lived in russia he could not revive the grant. no one was around 35 grant. the claim was it was wrong people in the first place and he didn't have a right to do it and it should be referred back to the family. he claims the consumer exception, false advertising, they felt people assumed smirnoff would still be russian sphere and off, and they changed the label to clarify that point. >> linda himelstein is the silicon valley bureau chief, she has worked for the wall street journal, legal times and san francisco reader. kepler's books hosted the event. for more information visit keplers.com.

>> what is a demagogue? >> there are the book offers, 4 part definition which is one of the few times anyone has defined demagogue for a while. i barrault elements from an 1838 essay by james fennel or cooper. there are 4 characteristics, a man of the people, person of the people is how they identify. the second, they trigger great emotional reactions from people. they use those irrational -- emotional reactions for political benefits and the most important one, they bend or break established rules of governance or law. >> who would you define as an american demagogued? >> q long was the quintessential american demagogue. there have been many other examples from daniel shea, a

revolutionary during the time of the constitutional convention. joseph mccarthy, george wallace, david duke has a burst, in louisiana, was a demagogue. and in history, when i talk about -- is beneficial, paradoxically you can have a demagogue, they test establish rules. if the rules are on just a, there's a chapter of british history where a demagogue was used as a term of praise. some demagogues' offer something. they can do good. most of the time, the term accurately is negative for harsh. >> since you brought it up, what is an example of a good demagogue and why?

>> the head of solidarity in poland when they were overturning the regime, the soviet regime, that was the beneficial demagogue, boris yeltsin in russia, a beneficial demagogue. there are a paradoxes, qe long was a dangerous figure in american politics but he paved highways, built public hospitals, public schools. his relationship to the people was routed on his boundless willingness to manipulate them for his own benefit but also in doing good things for thousands of people. >> the fight to save democracy from its worst enemies, the subtitle of your book, who is fighting against whom? >> great question. the book is about constitutionalism. it follows the stories of 6

great thinkers who watched as democracy stumbled around and encountered this. there is a paradox called a cycle of regimes where democracy will generate into tyranny, that is positive humanity since democracy was invented. that cycle is arrested when the people are committed to constitutionalism or a culture of republican values which requires a lot from natural citizens and keeps a leader on a short leash. the book's title refers to the flight of people to save democracy from itself. democracy can achieve extraordinary things as we have seen in america but demagogues can tap into people's willingness for something greater or different from a constitutional culture and cause it to collapse.

that is the fight. >> are there any contemporary issues with this conflict is going on? >> absolutely. one of the ironies of the bush administration was democracy was made the number one goal of bush's foreign policy, the freedom agenda was announced in the second inaugural of january 2005 and coincidence with freedom being on the agenda was an eruption of demagogues around the world, hugo chavez in venezuela, mouton outsider -- q --muqtada al-sadr who may iraq dangerous by turning people against the state, mahmoud ah d ahmednijad in the threat he

posed to other countries, the leader of hezbollah in southern lebanon, that is a classic demagogue. the list goes on. >> why did you write this book? >> a long standing transportation, why democracy to me is the most beautiful and extraordinary thing we have come up with. and society, in the course of the human condition, suffers from a paradox, which is freedom. our most valuable gift, we can so easily let it go. they had a beautiful constitution, and people of -- ordinary germans held -- handed their freedom to adolf hitler and it was turned against them.

it has gone through human history, over and over again, it happened in france. you had liberty, equality, fraternity. and then you had guillotines. the broadway version, you parad and i was fascinated by that. how do you make democracy work, how do you make it flourished? how do you make ordinary people hold it sowed the year so they prevent demagogues? there is an answer after years of thinking about it and it is constitutional. political scientists have thought about it, historians have thought about it,

philosophers, it helps to explain the majesty of the american victory over demagogues. the number one fear of the founding father was a demagogue with chapel the constitution and establish a tyranny, we have not seen that. time and again, americans in our constitutional culture have overcome the most pessimistic expectations of what might happen. fbi tried to pack the courts and take over the supreme court, american people snapped back at him so hard, he tried to pass the law anyway. >> would you do during the john edwards campaign? >> i am a national -- i was at the center for american progress in washington, i have been a long time, part of the book

comes from a dissertation, i have a doctorate in political science and a law degree, i have been a long time political activist and an activist on social justice issues including electoral reform, issues dealing with democracy. that partly explains the fascination of the book. i was john edwards's foreign policy adviser on his presidential campaign, issues of how to restore america's moral authority which is rooted not in military strength but the power of our ideas, we work the lot on this issue. i was proud of the work we did on promotion of democracy, expansion of some of the ideas i proposed in the broadcast. it is a multilayer book, has a

layer of political fury, and american history and foreign policy and national security. "demagogue: the fight to save r, america from its worst enemies". >> supreme court reporters provide an inside look at the manor, behavior and justice during some of the most newsworthy cases in recent memory. georgetown university law center in washington d.c. hosted the event. it is a little over an hour.

>> welcome. thank you for coming today for our discussion of the book recently released by the university of michigan press on argument in the supreme court. i am going to moderate our discussion. this book, edited by tim johnson, is a unique volume. the editors have assembled a series of essays written by journalists who covered the supreme court. each focuses on oral argument and the case before the supreme court and offers lessons on the court and the role of oral arguments. the supreme court's to sit in making process is a uniquely closed process to the public. virtually all the court's deliberations occurred behind closed doors. one of the only objections to the secrecy is oral argument. when the court spend an hour in public discussion of the case. oral arguments present the unique window on the supreme

court decisionmaking. the panelists have observed countless cases of oral argument, having had the unique opportunity to observe what the court does in oral argument, their experience gives us an interesting perspective on the public face of the supreme court. on our panel today we have one of the actors, tim johnson of the university of minnesota, and the authors of 4 of the lf and essays, dahlia lithwick, legal correspondent of slate.com, lyle denniston, supreme court correspondent who regularly contributes to scotusblog.com, charles bierbauer, senior washington correspondent and dean of the college of mass communication at the university of south carolina. and tony mauro, writing in the

legal times and american lawyer magazine. let me say about the process we follow today, we will ask tim johnson to describe how this book idea came about and what he and jerry goldman hopes to accomplish with it. we will then turn to the panelists to discuss the cases they explore in their chapters, they will tell us why they selected that particular case and explain what we can learn about or arguments from their case, then we will open the discussion to broader questions about oral arguments. >> thank you for being here. this project was the brainchild of jerry goldman and are, jerry is the founder and continuing controller of the web site which holds hundreds and hundreds ofis the founder and continuing controller of the web site which holds hundreds and hundreds of hours of supreme court audio and will hold all audio released by

the supreme court. both of us really have a passion for this, we thought it would be good to try to bring this process to many more people. you can go to the supreme court to hear the arguments that it is very limited. you can go in if you are lucky enough and hear an entire session of oral arguments but usually that is reserved for fewer than 50 people, often fewer than 25 people. you can sometimes sit in a 3 minute line or 2 minute line and sit in the back row for a few minutes to catch a glimpse of the justices sparring with the nation's best attorneys. and we thought it would be great to open this process to more people. with the audio on-line, that was one way to do it. we have an academic understanding of the oral argument process and that is how we have gone about that process for a number of years and we thought would be great to bring the public a much more insider perspective and who better to

bring in that insider perspective than those who were at the court day in and day out from the first monday in october until the end of june every term, tell us, the reader's of this country, those who write for law, those who are interested in the law, those who like understanding the supreme court what goes on during the proceedings and what they mean. we wanted to make a unique book that not only have the written word, like what tony mauro thinks about the case, but to go in and point you, the readers, not only to the written transcript but the audio transcript as well so as you are reading this book you can actually hear the attorneys arguing with the justices, a you can hear the questions from the bench and how the attorneys deal with those questions.

this book, the culmination of 5-1/2 to 6 years of work, working with these great authors, milled they're wonderful analysis with you, the reader's ability to go on-lin simultaneously reading the book, and listen to particular clips of the arguments, or as you are reading the chapter, to listen to the entire oral argument or in the case of bushverses tour, longer than an hour. you'll also get tellinggore, longer than an hour. you'll also get telling audio from the chapters. >> i picked a slight act of rebellion. if you ever read me, that is not

surprising. i have noticed and everyone on this panel has noticed that there has been an increasingly professionalized supreme court bar. a couple years ago i dumped 10 or 12 stupendous supreme court attorneys who limit their practice to the supreme court oral argument. i dubbed them the harlem globetrotters because they are so quick, they never miss a shot. more and more there is a sensibility that if you want to prevail, you just need to hire one of these top guns, and that wasn't always the case. you can only watch so many 3-pointers, and then it is not that interesting. so i thought i would pick for my chapter an oral argument done by rank amateur, someone who had never been with the supreme court, who was a surgeon by

training and shouldn't have had any place there at all. the case i picked was the oral argument you will probably remember from several years back, a gentleman who was an atheist challenging the insertion of the words under god in the pledge of allegiance, he is challenging it on behalf of his daughter who he felt shouldn't be compelled to say the word god. he was an atheist and offended him. i think we all thought going into the oral argument, hole the train wreck, this is going to be a debacle. those of us who followed him a little bit, had spoken to him on the phone or heard interviewed before, whirl argument, he had that quality of being the absolute wrong person to argue a case. i don't know how to put it more southerly. he was incredibly brilliant but very smug, very angry, very personal, he wanted to talk about the custody problem he was having with his daughter more than he wanted to talk about the

pledge, and going into oral argument, a lot of us went in thinking oh my god, this will be a bloodbath. this guy is too personal, invested, a great and having watched the harlem globetrotters over the years, i acquired a sense of sayre rules about how you conduct yourself, and a more dispassionate, the more emotionalist, the more professional you were, the better. any attempt to humanize the case for appeal to humanity or say you had a personal stake in the case was sure to backfire. the judges would go on screen saver if you try to the emotional or personal. we all probably thought this was going to be a debacle and this guy is going to go in and testify about his daughter and his investment in the case. and he did go in and do all those things. maybe we can hear a little bit

of his opening. [inaudible] >> this is what we thought would happen. can you stop for one second? know? you can't? all right. it was working when we started. let me try one more time. i apologize, guys. i guess you are going to need to read the beginning and i will bring the idea when we can get it going. >> okay. as compared to many other opening, out of any attorney's mouth that i had ever heard, he started this way.

every morning in the unified school district public schools, government agent teachers funding with tax dollars have their students stand up, including my daughter, face the flag of the united states, face their hands over their hearts and a firm that ours is a nation under a particular religious entities, the appreciation of which is not accepted by numerous people such as myself. i am an atheist, i don't believe in god and everyone in my child is asked to stand up, face the flag, put her hand over her heart and say that her father is wrong. it was the most personal the motive, invested, emotional thing i had seen and the reason i chose to do my chapter on that is it wasn't a train wreck. it was not only one of the most fascinating but persuasive, interesting moral arguments i ever saw in the court in 10 years. i chose it, even though i laid out in my chapter the

commandments about what thou shalt not do in the oral arguments, right out of the gate he was ignoring all my commandments, emoting and scolding the justices and acting smarter than them and talking back and doing all the things you would never see the harlem globetrotters do. he was really good. so i wrote my chapter about how good he was and how persuasive he was, how much i thought he brought to justice into his story, they became very invested in the custodial relationship with his daughter, they became interested in her feelings, the sort of thing that went in the face of everything we think we know about how oral argument has to be depersonalized and how the parties are not really people, just on paper. i will stop there and just say that my chapter is a lesson in how, if you are not going to play by the rules, if you are a little guy like the bad news bears, you can break all the rules and still win.

he didn't win, he lost on a standing issue, but he was one of the most impressive oral advocates. >> that want to apologize, we had the idea working before he started. it was all good and now something has happened in the interim. >> thanks for putting together this show. i chose the casey decision that was decided in 1992. beginning with justice

o'connor's ascension to the bench, it was clear in the roe vs. wade decision establishing a woman's right to have abortion, was under siege. each time an new opinion came out, the court appeared to be less committed to sustaining the right to terminate an abortion and it finally got to the point where the majority was down to 5. five-4. there were indications in 1989 that there might be a vote, and the administration had tried several times to persuade the court to overturn the ruling. i chose this particular case for oral arguments because of the audacity of the council who argued in favor of maintaining

growth. the women's rights movement, very much hearing was in jeopardy, shaved this case into a genuine test case. everyone was a test of the new principal. this was put together by the women's rights movement as a fundamental test of a viable precedent. we put together the brief, we asked the simple question, it was entirely unlike any question you will see at the front of the supreme court's petition for review. if you put that as a factual statement, the answer clearly was no, it has not overrule roe

vs. wade. there was a risk of addressing that issue. there were also in 1992, the presidential elections year. the supreme court case, into a political campaign issue, primarily try to helping clinton win the white house. in fact, there is some evidence from the political world that this case need help. there is another aspect in the argument which i think enticed me into writing about, the hardest thing that a lawyer has to do before the supreme court is keep control of the argument that they want to make.

some smart people who had done some thinking about the case are coming to the argument completely prepared to befuddle you and drive the argument in the direction they would like to do. it is important to remember the supreme court justices para not talk much about the case before they go into oral argument. oral argument is really an agenda setting moment. it really does shape the opening of the conversation that justices will have when they go behind the curtains and decide how they are going to vote initially on this case. .plant ..