good. >> host: that's interesting. i've certainly enjoyed the chance to talk to you about your work. i know we'll continue our conversation on this because there's a lot to be said. and i think one the things that i've learned from my own study of george washington is no matter what aspect of your life, his life that you study, it's fascinating and draws you in. he's one the really not only great men of history, but one the good men and interesting men of history. and your book, i think, shows that we have to be careful about what we believe. but as abigail adams said, a simple truth is washington's best eulogy. i've enjoyed the chance to talk with you. thank a lot. >> guest: thanks. it's been a pleasure.

: in all schools have migrated to the status of national policy. the discussion takes place of the heritage foundation in washington, d.c. and runs about an hour. >> what is taught in the law schools in one generation would

be believed by the bar in the following generation, end of quote, said one grade law professor, and he might have added that it would also, because it is widely believed by the bar, it would wind up being believed by much of the press and public. this is a -- was not a news story to me. i've written several books about the legal system and in more cases than not that can be traced back to academic origins. if you have a beef with the tort system for example in the united states, you should take it up with the berkeley. if he thinks that our system of sexual harassment law is less than ideal, your problems with professor catherine so it is with class-action law civil procedure and, employment law and many others.

and this can be traced big and small. i tell a story in my book about workplace law of the then all of idea that law for those of you that are not on looksism it's the improper bias by which employers are constantly hiring really great looking people and pay them more and promoting them further in preference to the rest of us who are more homelike. [laughter] yes it's unfair but not until around the time the harvard law review ran and 80 or 90 page student note the need for the law on looksism never had a thought it was an issue with a

law, but there and i believe the year 1999 there appeared this extremely long harvard law review student note and it didn't take long between before looksism became an interest for judges. indeed the district of columbia right here has passed one ordinance banning looksism and so have a number of other municipalities leading to the cases like the one reported a couple of years back of the gentleman finding it hard to keep his job at a retail outlet because the multiple tongue piercing as, which actually had inflicted on him a speech impediment, and he said to the newspaper this is what got me fired. and he called the lawyer i believe and was going to contest this. the harvard law review article had gotten a lot of these

implications and had gone to the extent of proposing wide use of telephone interviews for jobs and this is my favorite come interviews behind screens. [laughter] and we know that this is serious because the author of the harvard law review piece went on to write the law editorial for "the new york times" in leader years. he is now left that and is teaching law at yale, so help me. so the original title from my book was ten and bad ideas from the law schools and how they've changed the world at least that's how i started out what became coming and as you can tell i abandoned that somewhat daunting title and abandon the the framework for it because i couldn't answer the question. really, mr. olson, only ten? winner de going to stop? how long is this book going to be by the way?

and so i realized that i needed to turn in part to why we get so many of these bad ideas, why the law schools keep turning out certain kinds of bad ideas, and it's not just that they are randomly generated about ideas, and some of it, but only some of it is ideological. todd mentioned the law school's, let me understand again, are not exactly hotbeds of the literal thinking these days despite the best efforts of richard epstein, randy burnett, john mcginnis, richard epstein, richard prisoner, richard epstein -- [laughter] they are outnumbered, and it depends on which study you look at. in some studies it's only 6-1 or 8-1 democrats to republicans and a mother must be exaggerated 23-1 at columbia. those figures may be

exaggerated, and yet harvard according to people who did go for 30 years without hiring a single republican, the elena kagan i believe, and they maintained a committee over the lack of diversity while that wasn't hiring any republicans. john mcginnis of northwestern put it this way. even as the tory party are in sorry, the anglican church in great britain has been described as the tory party at the pulpit so the legal professoriate in the wall schools can be described as the democratic party. that has been changed and they mentioned it's been changed harvard, and indeed most schools that have any self-respect these days will have a libertarian or a conservative outspoken law professor.

they make hesitate to have more than one for fear they will breed. [laughter] but they do tend to have one, and things are changing. this is not new. this ideological flat goes back a long way, and if you wanted to could trace it back to a century ago who said that law should be conceived as applied social engineering. isn't that wonderful phrase which means the law schools might think of themselves as schools of engineering. but a really began picking up momentum during and after the new deal. various law professors joined the administration, even more notably people in the fdr administration went to the law school after they left and became professor. and the stage was set in 1943

for the publication of the most widely cited and most influential article lover published about the legal education about being the legal education and the law journal, and let me of political science and the time come he and mcdougal who was the professor, read this. the law itself just changed in a tectonic 9.0 richter scale way because the supreme court had given in in the switching time to save nine had decided that after all of the u.s. constitution did not prevent the government from running the economy it would agree not to strike down most regulatory

programs, and so we were clearly launched upon a new era at least so he thought in which the government would be giving much more than it ever did. and here we have the law school still teaching the same curriculum. this was the beginning of the articles argument. in particular call the law schools were still teaching mostly about the so-called contracts property and various other topics that were indeed typically thought of as necessary training for mainstream private lawyers who are going to do what and began arranging business deals resulting in the disputes in the main street advising affluent clients how to keep their money out of the government hands. but this wasn't what the lawyers of to margo should be learning how to do. he said instead of drilling

students and outdated matters the new curriculum should be determined in reference of the social the objectives and towards achievement of space values. you know when it gets that big or in trouble but he went on with some specifics and said that loss was often identified as the key author here. deemphasizing the private law and i'm quoting as contract and property, which are, quote, much favored instrument of the society. if you had to have recourse in property law, they asked why not take construction to the housing has the proper jumping off point for the course? worse yet, they argued was the public law, the constitutional law even though the supreme court had made it clear that it was now going to change to accommodate the government. clause well and mcdougal, planned, quote, the courses are

still organized with to much difference to the separation of power, jurisdiction, due process and equal protection, interstate commerce, etc., schools should recognize that the private inheritance was going to be kept to a minimum. the local government all, they've legalized lawyers needed to be trained in new forms of original government like the tennessee valley authority and how it had been set up and on and on the wall schools that should about the mission of the systematic training for policy-making. part of the ingenuity is this schools would stop training for the private lawyer the whole segment of society without being so important. and yet it was so terrible on any number of levels, let's face it, but let me address how

terrible it was as a prediction because had you been trying to change even a policy lawyer let alone a practicing main street lawyer the last thing you would have wanted to do is substitute the tennessee valley authority organization to indeed every single one of the concept they wanted to deemphasized turned out to be vitally important to this day and how the lawyers practice law and the supreme court applies it. so, richard li veldt as a prediction of what the lawyers need to know, and i would add parenthetically that every time you hear someone predicting that one area of the law will bloom so we should train more lawyers eight knorr them because they are approximately always wrong. back in the 70's and no one predicted the trademark

licensing law was going to boom which it did and they predicted the group and the services would bloom which they didn't and the divorce would shrink which it didn't and on and on. just always ignore them. but it wasn't just a matter of prediction, they were being a kind of ideological about, and even though as i will mention in a moment no one really adopted the program whole. a couple of inflectional atmospheric influences one of them as it got the professors used to the idea that their students were going to be out there and in the world and the policy sense rather than just doing business deals and tax planning, and that the principals themselves what move might be shaping the world. the law as it was done and prestige as it should be was up and prestige from then on and

some might say there was a possible problem of indoctrination. the answer to that when you teach students the old curriculum after all your indoctrinating them into different ways so you can't say that indoctrination mistrust which kind and we've heard a lot in the years since. as i say, no one adopted the program whole because it was too and practical, too truck fuel the curriculum entirely, and about ten years later something very noteworthy happened which got a lot of people's attention witches' jail will school dropped property as a required course. and this was almost unheard of because property in the first place is terribly important on the bar exam. it's terribly important in all sorts of areas of real life legal practice. but in jail students then as now worse tuesday become so smart and agile they could cram for

that stuff when to actively prepare for the bar exam and in the meantime think of the time he would free of the philosophical discussions, tralee stimulating interesting things and this ties and then as now as the most prestigious of all wall schools, and this is intimately related to the fact it was the most impractical of the jeal professors it came to be kind of famous they would be adorably clueless you have a problem you needed someone to solve and someone to bail out of jail or something. it was as if the presser to become professors and admired and when you confronted the man actual sick patient, and this got transmitted to other law schools who the competitiveness that so characterizes local school will and there's an irony

the top with grated egalitarian game about everyone being on the same footing in society and yet there are no debutantes who are half as jealous of each other as will all schools are and there are none who are as obsessed in technical orders as small schools with the u.s. news of a worse and between that and accreditation there's an enormous pressure for them to become more yale like. there's an interesting article by mulken glad well in the last months, one of last month's new yorkers in which he talked about the failings of the university ranking systems, and he points out with respect to the undergraduate experience that all schools are under pressure to pretend to be more deal and research oriented to interdisciplinary this and the

philosophical ground and professors in every area, yet this is not what actually works for most schools. i compare it to someone who looked out of the entertainment world and much of the most successful single act was lady gaga and they recommend all other acts become more lady gaga like. she's the one that can actually get away with that stuff and so it is with yale and it's highly philosophical, highly policy oriented way of the legal instruction. but it did work for yale because with us as much time spent on boring things like the old property law, they were able to generate all sorts of very influential new ideas. i will briefly summarize here because at the law schools like business schools and like education schools every five or ten years and some new completely new idea switches through. so you had charles with the new

property and the idea that the right to a government job or teacher tenure with the right to some regulatory fever from the government was a new property that you should be entitled to keep preferable to the old property. this is credited with touching off much of the rights revolution of the 70's and which the courts began creating various new due process and sometimes substantive rights with the consequences we see today in the difficulty of getting rid of badly functioning public employees and many other consequences. on to the public interest laws in the 70's very much a project marshall at the meeting will schools through the new conceptions of the constitutional law and which was believed that the u.s. constitution properly read would require the institution of more or less the entire agenda of

"the new york times" op-ed and down through identity politics with its notion that pretty much everything and all even secure transactions and bankruptcy law should be thought of as charged with greece and gender and every other personal category. some of these are much more disgustful. i trees in the book some of the rights revolution and as with slavery reparations and other areas where the ideas were so impractical they fell flat on their face when they went out to the actual courts. but the story culminates, or at least the latest episode of it is the rise of international human rights, and i believe there is no area faster growing in the law school and interest in the international human-rights. there's dozens of new centers and projects and litigations at

clinics and entities in the law schools. and if you are still thinking of international human-rights as something that is primarily meant for dissidence rotting away in dungeons and against the sort of newspapers with the sort of regimes they closed on the opposition newspapers, you are much behind the times. that is still part of the agenda. and yet, there is much, much more as you can see if you go to many of them university sites or human-rights watch and amnesty international where you are just as likely to see articles about the need for changes in domestic violence or sexual harassment law and the need for the quotas and the right to health care and to a minimum income, the right to collective bargaining, the right to be free of heat speech depending on which group you go to.

this has been creeping into american discourse and a variety of ways primarily i think to the influence of the legal academia, and some of you remember early this year when panel criticized the united states has been walking the international human rights violating and the list went on and on. as dozens of things the u.s. was doing wrong often my not having a big enough government. and the obama administration's response to this i found fascinating because the prominence in the response was it is so unfair for the u.n. to say the u.s. is systematically violating human rights direct health care for example we passed obamacare and took a giant stride towards recognizing our international human rights obligations in the health care. this falls into the category of the reassurance. i find it bothers some and that would be an additional reason to go against obamacare as people argued publicly that it was required for our international

human rights obligations and similarly in the controversy in the recent weeks in wisconsin. i wish i had the dollar for every time someone from the legal like edemea has argues with the governor walker did in revealing some of the old public union rights actually was a violation of the international human-rights. very wisely argued and should soon turn up in litigation. so there's a pattern here. much as it was preached in the 1970's that the u.s. constitution required if properly read the court enforcement of the agenda of "the new york times" editorial page. so now what is increasingly argue to the international rights properly applied still somewhat vague required this in "new york times" editorial page agenda. it gives the government more to do in that it is very much like most of the other ideas i talked about from the legal academia.

i talked about appointing most left ideas give the government more to do. but it gives specifically lawyers and judges more to do which is not always fdr's view that litigation should have a bigger role in society. gives intellectuals more to do because they're the ones who will often be listened to when we decide to resolve litigation and legal process rather than to the legislators were of their ways of doing things. so, he would have understood the will to power of yet another genre of intellectuals who have arranged in such a way as to make their own more influential and important and certainly good news for the graduates of the law schools. it's perhaps even better news for the faculty. i'm not so sure that it's good news for all the rest of us.

[applause] >> thank you. i'm going to ask the first question and then we will let walter choose his own and inquisitors. but i will remind you all to wait for the microphone and especially since we have -- we are recording this for heritage and for our c-span guests. please come state your name and identify any affiliation before you ask your question, and keep it to a question. i said i would mention my one criticism, and walter has actually touched upon at all the why don't -- i think that his original idea for the title may be was in the best commit him that i.t. is from local school. i'm not thrilled with the title that he chose, going to ask a very pragmatic question. it's not a screed so it doesn't deserve this great tidal. one screed title that might sell but be misleading is how will

schools are destroying america. i don't think that would have worked either. but do you mind telling us what the process is to focus group a book titled how you settle on this one, maybe with a wry have any talent with your title? >> first you're absolutely right i didn't want to signal a screed because they didn't want to write a screed, and it's not easy to come up with a title but the last we i would try to do it is the focus group because aware of all the edges. i was thinking i am afraid of it in part the school as a crown and the public festivals to make fun of the high and mighty, and i wanted to make fun of the high and mighty, and one day i was

looking for words that hadn't it been overused, and how it is destroying america has lost all dhaka decide from signaling its creed. it's still a word people haven't been using. so, that's as focus group a way i can think of. fred smith from cei. >> i haven't read the book yet, but you make a very good case of the intellectual self-interest would pursue quite well because their ability to gain moral prestige and also they gain power of in government and the sector. why given the threat this poses to launch of amoore businesses

because after all they have great resources, the general counsel and so forth are faced with a dislike the act and a business in this area and so many other areas seems to be passively waiting for? >> that's a good question. why has the business and those interested in the thriving of the entrepreneurial capitalist system, one has paid attention to the law school's coming and you could ask even more poignantly after reading the book because i tell at a considerable length how a very different group of mainly the town nation starting in the 1940's and 50's and later joined by other liberal, they were not neglecting allow all schools. they were calling in vast amounts of money and a great deal of other organizational skills into making false schools this almost conscious introduced in various themes sometimes

highly successful, sometimes not so. they were working more or less on their own, and i suppose if more conservative, libertarian donors who would have seen if they had let it in. it should be set parenthetically the law in the economics movement did this spring up and had a very considerable influence as it continues to have as a kind of counterweight to some of the bad thinking in some areas that hasn't been said it's only a partial counterweight and economics itself in the mix which people can take economics in a different direction. i think would make sense for people to who disagree with the directions to spend a lot more time thinking about it because the voices are scarcely heard. i mentioned richard epstein. he has to be used in six or eight different areas as the only recognizable person right

of center because there isn't anyone else and he's great at doing it about -- yes? >> my name is paul, and my question is i assume this isn't quite a fall under its own weight. we like to think it would with the commentary articles i've read and from today it sounds like the forces to perpetuate this are very powerful. if it isn't going to follow its own weight, what is to be done? can't be influenced -- and the lawyers, graduates of the law school use their economic weight to collaborate with other like-minded alums to pressure and if not what is to be done? >> the civil different questions here. first as the influence of the al-sayyid, we are at a moment of

crisis for the economics of all school and it's causing rethinking of what they should do, not necessarily an ideological rethinking it is in part of why if there is such a gap perceived by the law firms and others that higher between what they've been trained to do and with electorally wind up needing to know when the practice, and that serves as a significant break from the pursuit of completely fruitless theory, and indeed one of my things in the book is that we hit bottom years and years ago, the law school's tending to improve not only an ideological diversity in recent years but also the extent to which they are connected with real life and the age of the french deconstruction as some people to hire your graduates who and you see one jump ahead and it's

often worse now they are more successfully policy oriented and beginning to have a more successful influence how the government operates than 15 years ago and a lot of that is people like elizabeth warren would disagree with, but you have increasingly through blogging and real world of scholarship much more effective liberal forms and styles than you did back in the days of the critical theory. there's the second not that closely related question of where should a student want to go for a less than lopsided type of faculty and many people in a letter confident in their ideas are happy to get a place where there is support for them. there is now the george mason

school of law in the suburbs here which as the market strategy went out and scooped up a lot of conservatives and libertarians faculty who were undervalued types elsewhere has risen readily in the rankings and by almost any standard they've done acquiring, so even though it is easy to get discouraged about the trends, some of them also self correcting to some extent and there is quote a sum. alan dershowitz with whom i disagree on many other points with it this way everyone sees the reverse the as more of themselves and hiring is like the club in which you get hundred people that hasn't been set. there's almost no comparison and it's important in this between

the number of young faculty who would agree with many of us in this room and the same survey had you done it 15 years ago. no comparison there are so many more of them now. >> following up on that response, you know to the federalist society. do you think then that one avenue for counter to the dominance of the left is only going to come from the eletes themselves and in other words in order to get hired at any fool school with the exception of some of the for-profit schools you have to report for a federal judge and come with a degree. therefore the only opponent within the academy are going to be other people from the elite schools. do you agree that is essentially the only front that's open to countering this trend? >> i think that's very well put,

and the problem of bad ideas of harvard or yale will be met by the harvard and yale scholars with other ideas has indeed been happening. it isn't a matter of worth if you ran ten more ordinary law schools to get and you will balance off berkeley or other top-10 schools. ideas have consequences we always find different ways of getting back to the same point which is that one must have ideas that are qualified to invest in the letter signed ideas on the date, spreading money and having great organization, networking in the third place are roll hall and help people who want to succeed that have fallen by the wayside but nothing will substitute. >> christine hello.

i'm wondering what your thoughts might be on whether some of these wrongheaded ideas and the liberal academia translate to lawmakers pricks and state attorneys general were members of congress or state legislators, do these ideas and that of an influence to become? >> yes, i think they do and i give various examples in the book. in areas i know cei is interested in whether it is the proper role of the state attorneys general, the proper role of the statute of limitation which became relatively unpopular in the academic literature and without the overthrow of the statute of limitation when it ceases to be

respectable to defend notions like various other will limit on liability, respecting the law school's there will still be some judges who resist because there's a lot of strong minded but most are somewhere in the middle and plausible ground for ruling they don't want to be attacked in the law review articles and it works this way on things like citizens united and at the moment we have a strong minded bunch of supreme court justices and replace them with ones of opposite points of view but just once you are a little more susceptible to the academic and editorial opinion.

>> david bernstein. one thing you pointed out the will schools have become the reverse which i agree with the last 15 years or so. that hasn't happened in college history, political science, sociology, anthropology and so forth, and nine theory is this is in part because we have a supreme court and judges appointed by republicans and they are taking these ideas seriously the difficulties often than not but if you have some other and would be interested in why the law has had a shift whereas other disciplines seem to be used for the money will chuckle diversity. >> it's an interesting question and on the tendency of all schools to might be as ideologically extreme that's pretty well borne out in the

surveys done. the two disciplines and some others are even more lopsided which takes some doing. the law has been the most influential and i think you pose a very interesting first cut at y professors who particularly if they intend to specialize and the deutsch in the constitutional law, if they can't predict what the u.s. supreme court will do because they can't make themselves think even in a hypothetical way they are not going to be terribly good. all they can do is a real against it so indeed it's tended to reward professors who may be of liberal promises but at least take the time to treat seriously the idea to to dever from their own and you've seen a substantial body of liberals

who've made an effort to understand conservatives to the other institutions as well, and i'm not sure that it's only thought there may be some feeding in from the fact lots of very bright people go into the wall for many reasons other than changing the world to politics and the need to be catered to the views of lawyers generally after they've been at full school are more than the average but not left with of the law school, so there are a number of influences because it is inevitably constrains. >> in the back row. >> i was wondering what kind of reaction you've been getting

from people in the law school's. >> i just began touring a few weeks ago and so i've been to indiana, illinois so far and the response has been wonderful. maybe the ones who hate my guts wouldn't be in the same room with the faculty often agrees with what we might expect of a critique and a possible way of improving things. the students and sticking the talks dhaka of the crisis of why it's hard for them to find jobs but for whatever reason in the larger numbers than what i expected, and i mentioned we are at the moment economically

people representing things there is a lot of doubt how they will be rethought possibly if the banking system will be shaken not because the law firms that hire that and you sometimes do better than for hiring the higher up one possibly will be the fact they are so darn expensive and just as good an education. one way or another there are a lot of people who can gain an intangible way coming up with a better method in the issue that has come up for debate is would it help blow up the accreditation system, and i complained in the book that a lot of the trends i dislike are reinforced by the accreditation agencies which will require a commitment to clinical to education whether or not it

requires certain types of orientation online. bye people i respect blowing up accreditation which has presented us with a different set of problems but one way or another they are not working well. one more question. there was another one in the back row. >> this week the weekly standard had an article about the declaration of principles of academic freedom. are you familiar with the document? >> no. >> what i'm wondering is with the declaration does as others for a while it leaves of the standards and principles for with the academic freedom looks like and would give faculties for a simple a guidance on how they should be making the decisions about tenure and the articles they should be promoting and those things or a

least open to. what do you think about the standards where the academic community actually adopt them and then by faculty and other members that points out and says i'm not been afforded my academic freedom i should be afforded within his tenure or whatever else it might be using it would be helpful to combat this problem? >> i have considerable skepticism about efforts to promulgate the general principles of that sort and one of the earlier questions was what kind of outsiders to change the ideological and its quickly become at odds with the freedoms academics expect if it winds up being the state legislature putting pressure on the state law school we know that's happened in some instances the clinics in the general set of rules is going to be used to say

you see of the principles allow not to be interfered with it will also be used aggressively by people who want to defend boundaries. straying from the proper rules and so forth. i guess my general sense of the principle is we are better off if they don't change rapidly and if they remain decentralized you have a variety of different institutions and different academics can flourish, some of which are almost impossible from any direction and others which are more open to some signals and public opinion. not a very useful answer but i never claimed to have one. >> if you're interested in my teams with the international

human rights law as a flavor of the decade in the heritage had a tremendous program calling attention to the latest developments. >> i'm an adjunct professor of law at georgetown law center down the street. my question is related to something you've been asked and it's in three parts. have you noticed among these any of the top law schools a recognition on their part that there's an imbalance or the extent of the in balance. second, to the regard that as a problem and third, is their anything like a serious plan among any of them to address the imbalance? >> i wish i could read their

mind better. two years ago when adam at "the new york times" today good article on this general issue, this set of the ddt was the finding means of law schools or other sports who were actually defending the in balance and saying darn if you're going to change what we do, the wind up with people who think like me. there was some recognition and that certainly there are individuals we all know that have done wonders to make their families more diverse often at the price of bringing in people they disagree with. but the way i see give it is they don't agonize about anything more than they have to because their time is spoken for bye meetings and fund-raising. so unless there is discontent on

the outside they have to pay attention to, it is easy to move on to the ten things they know they have to worry but instead of adding and he left and won but no one has tested for months about and i think that is probably how the plurality actually treat the intellectual diversity issue. fred, again. >> a follow up, the anthropologist's sociologists connected to the real world check but i was very much in bed in the world economic and there's a dramatic asymmetry between the way the private law, part of the economic sphere and the federalists and others respond to these issues in the way the public will become of the trial lawyers, human rights lawyers and so on and their

intellectual allies and we've talked about where one seems to be strategic and the other seems to be winning cases. is there some way of raising the strategic awareness of our side to recognize the cultural war and we are fighting. >> the best for you you get me going is talking about the cultural war, metaphor. but the question is why the asymmetry. and let me pursue that for a moment because i spend a fair amount of time in the book talking about how a few move from groups like the american civil liberties union to the clinics and programs in the adjacent areas, you find that a whole lot of overlap. you find cooperation, sometimes the revolving door of highly qualified personnel, you find

that the publications and round tables and so forth are constantly informing many of the key academics and vice versa. you have tremendous cooperation. what we actually want that cooperation between the groups that or the ideological opposite numbers at the aclu or would that just make the law school's more polarized and ideological? i have my doubts that they should jump into a cozy relationship with conservative or libertarian think tanks or much less with groups that would have lobbying agenda still would be disastrous, and so, the question is therefore should we tell them stop being the aclu and date of around eight variety of groups.

spec why don't you stand up here or stay here to the concluding question. since i didn't know why john who introduced me was needed to mention my service on the u.s. commission on civil rights, but then you've explained the answer. i see a few of my colleagues. there's been several who have been agitating to abolish the u.s. commission on civil rights apparently because they want to replace it with a human rights commission. so if you wouldn't mind explaining what is it that is so attractive to the so-called progressive about human rights? i will suggest one. the civil rights law has some limits but there's no limit to what you can dream up in the human rights world. >> and i am also highly alarmed

by the effort to rename the things from civil rights to human rights. civil rights we conceived of as a bunch of categories having to do with minorities or others. not a member of that group human rights is meant to encompass ha fonts' plus rights of health care labour welfare and many others. it's easy to bring in the literature and the pronouncements of the groups that follow this. one thing that wouldn't change is the tremendous influence of legal the academia because in both of the civil rights and human rights area basically every new idea that comes along has been fitted to the literature and civil rights is a classic area where the body of opinion represented widely in

the country and in this room which is genuine equality of opportunity means not discriminating by race or gender. this is not got its large body of the economics behind the are unanimously the ones who write heavily and it's one of the reasons the civil rights law is incredibly hard to reform. it becomes even worse. >> i'd like everyone to join me in thanking walter. [applause]

this is where it really gets interesting. one of the individuals who was a slave to washington was judge, minute hero of blacks and she was a young woman, probably early to mid 20s who was mostly a slave to martha washington. she helped dress her, make cookies and to household work. and she found out somewhere in 1795, 1796 that martha washington was planning to give her away as a gift for a wedding to one of her relatives. what is meant is that whenever promise the washington's made to their sleeves at some point you will be free when we die was going to be out the door.

so she began to make her plan to get out the door. so one night in the spring of 1796 while washington's were in the living room having dinner, she went out the door. you can see them calling her, where's the soup, where is she at? she was gone. she made contact with the black community there and have her clothes and other personal possessions and then she vanished. now as it turned out, accidentally she was discovered to be in new hampshire. though washington's found out through just completed accident, and so they decided to go after her because even though as president of the united states, and someone who declared himself as antislavery, you would have thought he would have said she's gone, representing the country,

let it go. they wouldn't let it go so they went after her and initially they said in on with the they were embarrassed so they tried to do it in the subterfuge so the set and all envoy to be with her and sit down and say if you come back, then we will work it out, all was forgiven and basically we will let you be free. and she was well, i am free now. so i don't really see the point of this discussion. i'm not going back. so that program failed petraeus then washington decided we will have my nephew and have a way to bring her back. but she was warned in the so she was able to get away and the washington's never got her back. and in fact she lived to be very old. i think well into her 80s. she became active in her

community. and even though she never went back into slavery all the rest of her life she was basically a fugitive during the fall of the country at times. now think about it. this is a young woman who basically challenges the most powerful person in the country. not just a small farmer, the president of the united states with all political power in the country at his beck and call. but he is driven by freedom and rights and talks about the inspiration from the government that happened in the early 70's and whether you were liberated or not come every single sleeve in the country knew about the haitian revolution. but also inside the american revolution. so, think about it. her and the people who were slaves suggested they were there at every moment in the discussions and the debate about

american democracy and freedom to read the that more of an e year and more access to those who made the discussions than any of the scholars and people writing about the government of the time. so how could they not be influenced, how could they not understand this much more profoundly than anybody else out there. most of them didn't have the opportunity to east cape and get away but she did. i got caught, the washington's really want it to put down and shes a i've got to go. >> to and watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. ..