extraordinary faces about to leave for the united states. i think they tell the story of the mysteries of mexicans. the subtitle indicates. >> this is c-span book tv talking with jorge castaneda. thank you for being with us. >> thank you. >> the next three hours is your chance to speak with author and professor eric posner. professor of law will speak on the limits of international law, difficulties of a climate change treaty, and the balance between security and liberty. the author of law and social norms and the perils of global legalism. the co-author of several other books including climate change justice and the executive unbound. >> and welcome. this is book tv monthly of their

call-in program where we feature one of there and his or her body of work. we are pleased to feature eric pose honor. a law professor at the university of chicago. in fact, we are in chicago at the chicago tribune's printer's row with vast and we are joined by a studio audience as well he will have questions. professor, if we could, start by giving us a snapshot of what you do and what you read about. >> i am a professor of law at the university of chicago. i write about a number of different topics. constitutional law and particularly the powers of the presidency. international law, and other legal fields. ..

>> guest: he is, before he was a judge, he was an academic, also, at the university of chicago high school. and he's well -- law school. and he's well known for a variety of opinions on various things. this legal world he's best known for introducing economics to the law. >> host: well, let's show you professor posner's book so you get an idea of what he does write about n. 2000 he published his first book, and that was "the law and social norms." he's also written "the perils of global legalism." that came out in 2009. now, professor posener has co-authored several books.

that includes the limits of international law, the new foundations of cost-benefit analysis, terror in the balance, climate change justice, and the the executive unbound, and i want to start with that one if we could, professor posener, the executive unbound. in my reading of that book, is it fair to say that you write the separation of powers as established in the united states is not working? >> guest: that's right. it's not working. it's eroded over the centuries, and the result is that the executive, the president, has become much more powerful than the founders had anticipated when they designed the constitutional system in the 18th century. >> host: is that a bad thing? >> guest: i don't think it's a bad thing, and part of the purpose of the week -- book is to criticize conventional wisdom; this is a bad thing, the president has become too powerful, he's unaccountable to

the people. in the view in the book, the view that i assert with my co-author is that the world has changed a great deal in the last 200 years. congress and the judiciary no longer function as well as the founders anticipated that they would, and there's been a natural devolution of power to the presidency as a result. >> host: who is your co-author? >> aide ran very mule, he's a professor at harvard law school. he used to be a colleague of mine at the university of chicago. >> host: so what has been the practical effect of having a more powerful executive? >> guest: well, for example, the libya intervention. president obama decided, essentially on his own, to send u.s. military forces into libya. under the constitution as written, he's supposed to get the authorization of congress. that did not happen. that, obama's not the first person to do this, president clinton did something similar in 1999 when he sent u.s. forces

into serbia, and other presidents have before. so this is an evolution in presidential power. it's one the congress has, basically, acquiesced to. >> host: now, there was a lot of criticism during the bush administration about the power of the executive, and dick cheney a well known proponent of executive power. did the bush administration push the ball forward when it came to, as you say, unleashing or unbinding the executive? >> guest: it did, but not as much as people generally believe it did. one of cheney's ideas was that the presidency was actually much powerful up to the nixon administration, and then there was this backlash as a result of watergate. and cheney's view that was for the country to be secure and to function well, the presidency had to be as powerful as it was up until nixon. and so he and others in the administration in an unusually self-conscious way sought to

reassert these powers. but much of what the bush administration did, perhaps all of what it did, fell comfortably within precedents of previous presidents. and the same thing with obama. presidents do have a tremendous amount of power, and the bush administration took advantage of existing understandings, traditions and precedents. >> host: well, another thing you write about quite a bit is international law. we've gotten this e-mail in for you, and this is from christopher wank of virginia. do you believe that the obama administration has mostly continued or departed from the bush administration's legal framework in the fight against terrorism? >> guest: mostly continued it. there have been some significant breaks. the -- but on examination they seem less significant than they might appear. so the obama administration

repudiated torture, of course, but the bush administration had also more or less given up on coercive interrogation or torture by 2007. the obama administration wanted to try more people, but it's had to give up on that idea. but in other respects the obama administration has continued bush administration policies. wireless surveillance -- sorry, warrantless surveillance is an example, the use of drones to assassinate people who are considered threats to u.s. security including american citizens, the assertion of strong secrecy privileges which has made it difficult if not impossible for people harmed by counterterror operations to bring lawsuits. in these and other ways, and really, you know, detention of people without trial is something that was greatly criticized during the bush administration, but the obama administration has continued with that as well.

>> host: professor posner, in "the executive unbound," you use the term tiran phobia. what is that? >> tiran phobia is the combination of tyrant and phobia, and it's the unreasoning fear of an excessively powerful executive. and this country has a long tradition of tiran phobia. at the beginning it was quite justified because when the country was founded, it was only large republic or quasidemocracy at the time. most countries were kingdoms. and the founders who were well read in the classics and in european history as well feared that the u.s. would follow the precedents of other republics and degenerate into a monarchy and then into a tyranny. so they were very worried about this, and the constitutional design can be explained in large part by their efforts to prevent that from taking place. um, what i, what has happened,

though, over the last few hundred years is that most countries in the world have become democracies, various institutions that were unknown in the 18th century including the party system and the kind of modern, robust freedom of the press have arisen which, i think, have greatly reduced the fear of, reduced the risk that a powerful ective would engage -- executive would engage in abuses of power. >> host: two of your books that you've written with professor vermule, the executive unbound and terror in the balance. were these written for law students, or are these written for the lay public? >> they were intended for both groups. scholars and the public. but they do assume a certain amount of knowledge about the history of the presidency and constitutional law. so certain segments of the public. >> host: in "terror in the balance," this is a quote from "terror in the balance." if case for coercive

interrogation during normal times is weak because the moral harms outweigh the benefits, the case dramatically strengthens during emergencies. >> host: what does that mean? >> guest: well, so this goes back to the bush administration era debates about coercive interrogation. and the view that we advance in the book is that, essentially, a utilitarian one. so any policy that the government might pursue is justified if benefits are greater than the costs. if it helps people more than hurts them. and so this is something that everybody is familiar with, with, you know, prisons that cause harm to people, but they're justified because they reduce crime. the same idea applies to coercive interrogation. now, there's a long history of abuse of coercive interrogation

which provides very strong reasons for not using it, certainly not in normal times. and in an emergency, and then everybody, you know, standardly appeals to the ticking time bomb, hypothetical. there's a stronger argument for using coercive interrogation just because during an emergency when there's a significant threat to the public, the benefits from using it go up. the harms from using it are still considerable, and so it shouldn't be done lightly. but there may well be a justification for using coercive interrogation in such circumstances. >> host: in the subtitle of that book, "terror in the balance," you refer to the court system. what are some of the court cases that have changed how we look at terrorism and how we treat coercive interrogation? >> guest: well, surprisingly, the courts have been silent. they haven't had as much influence on counterterror

policy as one might have expected. i don't mean literally silent, there have been cases and well known supreme -- >> host: the hamden case. >> guest: what's interesting about these cases is, you know, people were challenging the bush administration, for example, for detaining people. the supreme court says, you know, that's fine. you can detain people because we're at war. people challenged the bush administration for having military trials rather than civilian trials for suspected members of al-qaeda. the supreme court says, well, we don't like this so much because of problems with the statute, so congress just amends the statute, and these types of trials are still possible. the supreme court has never really addressed the issue of torture. there are some older cases that suggest very strongly that torture violates due process, but not war on terror cases.

>> host: again, welcome to "in depth." this is your chance to talk with author and law professor eric posener. 202 of 46finish 624-1115 for those of you in the mountain and pacific time zones. you can also send us an e-mail, booktv@cspan.org is our e-mail address, or send us a tweet, twitter.com/booktv, or our handle is@booktv. we'll be taking those call over the next couple hours and taking questions from our audience here in chicago as well. what do you mean by the term, "global legalism"? >> global legalism means the excessive faith with, excessive faith in international law as a solution to problems of international cooperation and security. >> host: is there such a thing

as international law? >> guest: yeah, there is such a thing as international law. >> host: is it effective? >> guest: it's effective in limited circumstances. and the view that i call global legalism in which i criticize is a view which you see more maybe in academia and certain, and in europe, for example, more than in the united states which is that if countries would agree to more international treaties, problems like war and climate change and so forth would go away. and the argument in the book that i make is that there are basic problems of collective action at the international level which do not exist within countries, and it's very difficult to solve those problems through international law. >> host: and in your 2009 book, "the perils of global legalism," you write that politics, idealism and careless thinking conspire to produce a picture of international law that bears little resemblance to reality.

>> guest: right. so the, there's, so there's a view of international law, especially human rights law, for example, that it's actually, it actually constrains states quite effectively. and during the bush administration people criticized the bush administration for violating certain norms of international law. but it did so because it could. and other countries violate international law because in many circumstances they can get away with them. now, in some circumstances states cannot get away with violating international law, and from an academic perspective what's important are the conditions to understand it's effective and ineffective so you're more likely to produce effective rather than ineffective institutions. >> host: what are social norms, and who arkansas bites them? >> guest: they're hard to define.

one could think of them that are rules that are, in fact, not enforced by any particular individual or institution, so no one really arbites them although people will, emily post and people who write etiquette books or give advice to people about how they should behave. but one of the very interesting and frustrating things about social norms is we're never really sure of what they are, and we're constantly negotiating about them. >> host: in your book, "law and social norms," you write: >> guest: yes. so one of the points in that book is that law professors had spent too much time trying to evaluate laws in a kind of sociological vacuum. so the implicit picture in a lot of legal scholarship is that you've got the government, and you've got a set of law that the

government creates, and the government enforces those laws, and that's all that's going on. there's also a smaller tradition in legal scholarship which is critical of this view, and it's the tradition that i belong in. it points out, in fact, in most of our everyday life, our behavior is not governed that much by the law. instead it's governed by social norms or, and another way of putting it is how people perceive us, our concerns about how people perceive us, our instinct to conform with what other people are doing. and it may be that in certain circumstances the government can cleverly harness the power of these social norms in order to -- >> host: you also write that it's expensive to respect manners to enforce social norms. >> guest: yes. this is -- one of the funny things about social norms is you often see people behave anything

ways that they don't really want to behave in, that make them uncomfortable or that are costly. so there's a social norm which is eroding gradually but that, you know, men wear ties, they wear suits the way we do. it's not that comfortable to wear a suit or a tie. i have a tremendous amount of trouble remembering how to tie the knot every morning and getting the length right, and it's, it's a source of unreasonable frustration for me. this is how i started thinking about these things. so if that's the case, you know, why don't people just dress the way they want to all the time. but they don't, and that's the interesting question, why they don't. and trying to understand that has been a challenge that people have been trying to meet but not very successfully for centuries. >> host: but as a law professor, what does that have to do with the law? >> guest: well, so suppose you're concerned about crime in the inner cities, for example. too much crime, we want to do

something about it. the standard approach under the old -- the conventional way of thinking is, well, you pass more laws, and you increase the sanctions, and you hire more police, and, you know, you hope that the crime rate will go down. and there's not actually that much evidence that the crime rate will go down as a result of those actions. it might help on the margin, but the crime rate both going up and going down, it's not explained in such a simple way by the policies that the government chooses to use. what's going on? >> well, in some inner city areas it may be the case that if you actually break the law, that will actually enhance your status. and so people who break the law, if law is made even stricter, then the incentive to break the law might go up as well. so there are these worrisome, perverse incentives that might be created if we don't take into account what's actually motivating people. >> host: again, one more quote from your book "law and social

norms" and this deals with private: >> guest: the erosion of privacy, is that what i said? >> host: you said increased commitment to privacy. >> guest: yeah. >> host: over the last century is tightly link today the decline of community and the rise of the rule of law. >> guest: yeah, well, it was a while ago that i wrote that, and, um, i think probably what i was thinking is that, um, so in the old days, you know, maybe in the 19th century in a small town somewhere people didn't commit crimes very much. why did they not commit crimes very much? it wasn't because there was this big police force and the courts and all that apparatus that we rely on today, it's because everybody knew what everybody else was doing. there was no privacy. and so if you did something that was harmful, you'd be run out of town or ostracized or something like that. so over the years the scale of

human interaction has increased enormously. and this has created the need to have pure rocktyization, to have more police and personal judicial systems. and in the course of this happening, you now have the -- there's a kind of a cost and a benefit. the benefit is you're no locker constantly being watched by people, and that makes you more able to have privacy in the first place, and that makes people more aware of what they lose when the government comes and takes away your privacy. on the cost side, you have to deal with all these bureaucrats and police and so forth who may not be as sympathetic and sensitive to the needs of a community than one's neighbors were back in the old days. >> host: this is "in depth." the phone numbers are on the bottom of the screen. 202 is the area code. 624-111 in the east and central time zones, 624-1115 for those of you in the mountain and

pacific time zones. al booktv@cspan.org is our e-mail address, and our twitter if you want to send a tweet to law professor eric posener, twitter.com/booktv. we're going to begin with a call from adelphi, maryland. please go ahead with your question or comment. >> caller: good day, mr. posner. i have strong opposition to you. we have just witnessed a giant killing over the last 20 years. 4.5 million people killed in if iraq, 2-7 million people killed in afghanistan through starvation, bombing, food and six million people from uranium that came from our first atomic bombs in eastern congress go and more. congo and more. pneumonia berg principles and medical protocols were written because of the code in 1933. you've personally written that

the laws of war, international laws of war are hampered by the technology of war, the ability for war. that's exactly how they're intended. anyone who's been to war, has suffered war, the veterans of world war ii wrote the enough pneumonia burg principles. i'd like to read -- >> host: you know what? we're not going to have time for that, but professor posner, what do you say to that caller? >> guest: well, let's see. so there have been a number of wars recently that have killed a lot of people. i wasn't sure what the reference to the atomic bomb was, but maybe i misunderstood that. these words may or may not have been justified. it's not really my area of expertise to evaluate them. of course, i have opinions, but the question was really about the laws of war. so wars are supposed to be conducted according to certain rules, and these rules are embody inside the yes geneva

conventions and other treaties and norms of customary international law. in world war ii, the nazis violated all of these rules, and unusually, this had not happened before at least not in as dramatic a way, the allies tried them for war crimes and crimes against humanity, convicted a number of them, and they went to jail. and at the time the view was this is going to start a new era in which these sorts of atrocities would not be repeated. now, one of the points i make in my work is precisely that that has not happened. there have been any number of atrocities, including general sides that have taken place since world war ii, and soldiers continue to commit war crimes. this is true about american soldiers and other soldiers. so the question is why haven't the laws of war stopped this from happening? and if my scholarship what i try to do is explain why they're weak. and it boils down to the fact that we don't have a world

government, we don't have an international court powerful enough to compel people to comply with these wars. instead, states have to engage in a kind of decentralized form of cooperation. that form of cooperation is very weak because the states are all independent, some are powerful, some are not so powerful. and the result is that these sorts of violations continue to occur. i mean, i certainly don't think this is a good thing, and i've never defended violations of the laws of war. i do think and maybe this is what the caller was referring to, that the rules that have been established to address atrocities may probably mean more sense at the time they were invented than they make today when we have new sorts of problems. problems like al-qaeda. >> host: in your 2005 book, "the limits of international law," you write that some global problems may simply be unsolvable.

>> host: yes. well, i do think that's a problem, and a big problem. i don't think we're ever going to address the problem of war. i think war is always going to be with us. i'm pretty skeptical that the, that there's ever going to be a realistic and effective treaty to address climate change. why is -- and what i've always been interested in is why is it so difficult for countries to do this on a global level when in a developed country problems of security can be addressed pretty effectively? and the -- and i think the reason is, again, there's no global government. people are too diverse to be willing to get together and form a world state. so cooperation among states is necessarily limited, and that's just something that we have to live with. >> host: is the u.n. an

effective body for international law arbitration? >> guest: no. it's not effective. this is partly by design. the only, the only part of the united nations that really has legal authority is the security council. and the security council has 15 members, five of them can veto anything, any resolution that's proposed. and so these five countries -- the united states, france, britain, china, russia -- they rarely agree about anything. so it's, it becomes very difficult for the security council to order that something be done that will address the problem. the question is why can't we reform the security council? maybe we could have majority rule or something like that. but then what happens is no state will concept to that -- consent to that because they're afraid they'll be in the minority with respect to some

issue that matters a great deal to them, and then that would cause serious problems that they're not willing to tolerate. that's the basic problem of international organization, and the united nations doesn't solve it. >> host: on the first weekend of june every year, the chicago tribune sponsors the printers row lit fest held in downtown chicago. we're at the university center at the corner of state street and congress just south of the loop. we're with author and law professor eric posner for our "in depth" program. we're also covering, booktv is also covering several panels here at the lit fest this year, and you'll be able to watch those live. we covered several yesterday, we'll be covering three more this afternoon that you'll be able to see. we've also invited a studio audience here for people if they're interested in talking with judge posner. you can stand at the microphone, we'll be glad to take your questions as well. this e-mail from alex mccleese, and he is a history

ab candidate here in chicago. my name is alex, and i live in be oak park, illinois. my question is, in the wake of wikileaks what legal challenges might be possible or desirable regarding international law governing the internet and also regarding law dworching journal -- governing journalistic publication of classified information? >> >> guest: well, that's a complicated question. there is really no international law governing the internet. i think there are a number of agreements and protocols and so forth that insure that the internet functions across borders, but there's nobody you can go to, no international body you can go to to either challenge or defend the wikileaks people. there are laws that, you know, wikileaks probably violated, laws against the dissemination of classified information. it's very difficult to enforce those laws for lots of complicated reasons. but strengthening them probably

wouldn't do much good because, and this is the whole point of wikileaks, is that the institution or the people that you would need to prosecute or go after are spread around the world where the united states doesn't have the power to reach them. >> host: jackson, wyoming, thanks for holding. you're on with author eric posner. >> caller: yes, hi, mr. posner. first off, let me say that the concept of the tie you're wearing came from the galatians, and it was first used as a handkerchief. but my question to you is what does religion have to do with international law? i mean, how can countries, states come together with the belief system that was brought to us for people who believe that the earth was flat? and how can we get a movement to get rid of -- [inaudible] that's one of my questions. thank you. >> host: any answer for that caller?

>> guest: well -- [laughter] maybe at a more general level maybe what the caller's question illustrates is the tremendous diversity of opinion not just in this country, but around the world. this is one of the reasons why it's so difficult for countries to get together and agree on international law, because legal, any kind of legal enactment assumes something like a consent, at least the majority, usually more of the majority. so even within a particular state where, you know, people generally have similar values and interests, it's very hard to get dramatic legislation enacted. at the international level, this problem is multiplied enormously. there are almost 200, around 200 countries. people in these different countries have wildly different views, different religious views, different views about policy, and this makes international cooperation very difficult. >> host: we have a question here in our audience. if you would tell us who you are, sir, and ask your question. >> guest: yes, my name is david

curtis, i'm a resident of the chicago area, and i think a lot of citizens have looked with a certain degree of distress at the last several supreme court appointments where democrats seem to be aligned on one side, republicans seem to be aligned on the other side. and my question to you is, to what extent is this -- i know it's not new -- but to what extent do you see it being increased, and to what extent do you think that's a problem? >> guest: yeah, i think, i agree with the premise of your question, that this is a worrisome trend. as you mention, it's not really new. there are, there are examples historically where presidents nominated and ultimately had .ed supreme court justices for, basically, political reasons. most famously, fdr who got justices appointed to endorse the new deal which up until then had been received pretty keptically by the supreme court.

but i do think the problem has gotten worse since the 1960s, 1970s. and the reason is that the supreme court, particularly in the 1960s under chief justice warren, became much more aggressive about advancing political or ideological view about the meaning of the constitution and became more aggressive about striking down laws, particularly state laws. and this created a political backlash, of course most famously with roe v. wade. and people became much more conscious about the supreme court and began to believe that, you know, essentially, if supreme court justices of their party were in the majority, then, you know, their ideological views would be, would prevail in the political arena. and so this accelerated with the, with the bork nomination in the 1980s, and i think now both the supreme court and aloer federal -- also lower federal

courts there's this view that because these justices have so much powerful to strike down federal and state statutes, it's important to have justices in place that support my or your political opinion. i don't think there's any way out of this until -- unless the supreme court just decides on its own to be less aggressive about striking down statutes. >> host: this tweet for you, professor posner, from neorepublican. posner is an untidy thinker. justifies torture on cost benefit analysis, but whose analysis is used? anyone who justifies torture. >> guest: so i should comment on that. >> host: yes. >> guest: okay. [laughter] you know, let's see. so, first of all, justifying torture on the basis of cost-benefit analysis, that's not quite what we were trying to do in this book. what we were really interested in understanding is why people regarded coercive interrogation or torture as so much more, you

know, horrible and shocking than other sorts of things that the government does in which are not nearly as controversial. putting somebody in jail for life as a way of impose ago tremendous amount of harm on that person. and but we tolerate it because the benefit -- well, i have to say because the benefits are greater than the cost. the cost to that person are quite large, but the benefits to society are large as well. so if you take that logic and you apply it to torture, the same sort of analysis applies. it's just that the empirical question of the effectiveness of torture and its sort of second order effects on people are much more complicated. now, to be clear, you know, i don't think the bush administration ever really did a good job of justifying torture, and i'm not persuaded torture was an appropriate tactic in the last ten years. in the book, we're addressing more of the, the more

theoretical question which is why is it -- what's wrong with it if the government is allowed to put people in prison? give another example, under the obama administration it's considered okay and relatively uncontroversial to kill people without giving them, you know, a trial and the traditional protections that proceed the death penalty. well, except for extreme forms of torture, killing a person is much worse than to have curing -- torturing him, and yet some sort of cost-benefit analysis is used to justify this process. so i find that puzzling. having said that, i understand that there are a lot of -- torture is an extremely ugly practice. it's certainly not something you'd want to do unless you're in an emergency and there's an immediate threat to a large number of people. and even then there are very strong arguments that it's, that it's, it won't be justified. it'll have harms worse than whatever short-term benefits it has. so maybe my uncertainty about

these factors make me an untidy thinker, but that's the best i can do. >> host: you write: >> guest: yeah. so taken out of context that might sound more critical of the courts than i am. the problem which has been pointed out by, actually, supreme court justices and many other people for many, many decades is that during wartime the courts are in a peculiarly difficult position. justice robert jackson made this point during world world war iin some famous cases. t just very hard for the judges who don't have military experience, who don't usually have much foreign policy experience to be able to second guess the government when the government says, you know, we have to put those people in jail, or we have to send troops

in that location or these sorts of harsh tactics are necessary; detention or military trials or what have you. and the tradition in this country really up until maybe the last ten years is that the courts are silent during war. they just are not willing to tell the ective that -- executive that earn wartime tactics are justified. now, you asked -- you mentioned earlier to me that i'd said the courts didn't do much during the last ten years. i mean, that's a little bit of an exaggeration. they did do more than they'd ever done in the past. they did review and criticize executive policy much more than in the past. but like in the past, they ended up not issuing decisions that caused dramatic changes in policy. and the reason is, you know, they're judges. they're used to interpreting contracts and, um, addressing, you know, race and sex discrimination. and suddenly the country's at

war, and they're asked to evaluate internment policies, and they don't feel like they're qualified to do that. >> host: art mccord from greensboro, north carolina, e-mails to you: professor posner, in connection with your analysis of the rise of the executive, what role does the parallel rise of independent agencies such as the fcc, sec, etc., how do these agencies differ from the various government departments like the commerce department, agriculture department, etc. >> guest: that's a very good question, and so, you know, many people won't know the legal background here, but just very briefly one of the features in the rise of the executive is the growth of the bureaucratic state. so before the roosevelt administration most of the things that, you know, are problems -- pollution, fraud and

so forth -- they were dealt with by state governments. and then in the last 30 years the federal government has, to an extent, taken over. one of the issues was, you know, who in the federal government should run the agencies that do these tasks? and, ultimately, most of the agencies, let's say the epa, for example, are basically controlled by the president. the president appoints the head of the agency and can remove the agency. there's certain independent agencies, and the most famous, of course, is the fed where the president has somewhat less control because he cannot remove the people. so how do these fit in? well, they are constraints on the executive relative to a world in which these independent agencies do not exist, but relative to where we were 50 years ago, they tend to enhance the president's power because the president does have a fair amount of power over independent

agencies as well as ordinary agencies. >> host: we have another question from the studio audience. ma'am, if all tell us who you are and what your question is. >> guest: my name is edna, i'm from cleveland, ohio, and i came here for the printers row. and my question, i hope you want to comment on it. i don't know whether you will or not, but i'm wondering about arab spring and the people's movements in the middle east. sometimes we're intervening, other times we're not. what about international law in that regard? >> guest: well, so international law as it often is and to the disappointment of people is silent on the arab spring. it doesn't really say anything that's relevant. and from the u.s. perspective the arab spring is a matter of policy, and there's a basic trade-off. the u.s. government wants to

promote democracy. but at the same time it's afraid that if it puts pressure on the authoritarian leaders of some of these countries, the country will just collapse into chaos and anarchy. that's worse than an authoritarian system, at least in the eyes of the administration. some people might say that human rights treaties have something to say about the arab spring. it may be the case that the pro-democracy people are influenced by human rights treaties. it's more likely that they simply find the west and western institutions like the rule of law more attractive and democracy more attractive than the authoritarian systems in which they live. >> guest: thank you, ma'am. we are live here in chicago with professor and author eric posner for our monthly "in depth" program. next call comes from sherman oaks, california. please go ahead.

>> caller: hello. my question relates to climate change and international climate justice. has any attempt been made, professor posner, to your knowledge to determine in approximately what future year or decade the united states' contribution to accumulated atmospheric carbon dioxide will no longer be the single largest accumulation from one nation as it is now after so many decades of our being the greatest national emitter, until which time i suggest our nation has an outsized obligation to take the lead in reducing fossil energy use, pioneering dramatic energy efficiency and green energy measures and technologies and organizing a global response to climate change, which the u.s. so far has emphatically refused to do, clearly, thanks mostly to the republican party's climate policy irresponsibility.

>> host: great. we got your point. thank you, caller. professor posner. >> guest: yeah. well, you know, i agree with the caller's sort of general view. um, first to answer the question. the, china's going to overtake the united states as, you know, the aggregate of greenhouse gases, i don't know, maybe in 20 30rbgs years, i don't know the exact amount. but that wasn't the point the caller was trying to make. the point was that since the united states has been, you know, has made a substantial contribution to the problem of chime change, it should try to lead a response. i agree, there should be, you know, in an ideal world there would be a treaty that would result in the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions to some kind of tolerable level. and i agree, also, that the republicans dragged their feet, and that was quite unfortunate and not justified. but the problem is a climate treaty is not going to work

unless china, india, brazil and other huge industrialized nations participate. and they don't seem to be willing to do that. that's the problem. now, why, why aren't they willing to participate? i should say, you know, they're willing to receive money, you know, they're willing to receive subsidies to reduce, but they're not willing to cut back on their own at some cost to themselves on climate emissions. why is that? well, the reason is not denialism. you know, ironically, in china where the government has been reluctant to join a climate treaty, the government hasn't tried to deny that climate change is a serious problem that's caused by humans. what i think is going on in china is that they've, you know, they've got other priorities. and if you've been in beijing or any other major chinese city and you look around and you see immediately, you know, this massive pollution, the pollution is particulate matter. you know, you can't see very far, t horrible to just

breathe -- it's horrible to just breathe and open your mouth. and to the extent the government wants to adopt policies that will garner some support from the public, the immediate thing to do to get a political payoff is to try to reduce that type of pollution rather than greenhouse gases which are invisible and have have a longer-term effect. this is a problem. you know, i wish i had a solution to it. um, the u.s. cutting back on its own is not going to address the climate problem in any significant way. >> host: in your book, "climate change justice," this is the picture on the front cover. do you know where this was taken? >> guest: no, i don't. it the publisher. but it's a great

. >> guest: one claims the u.s. is responsible for a substantial amount of greenhouse gas emissions so far, and the other is that the u.s. and other wealthy countries should bear more of a burden because they're

rich, and other countries are poor. and oneover the arguments in the paper -- one of the arguments in the book is that, in fact, these claims while intuitively appealing are actually much more, much more complex and problematic than they first appear. and so, for example, you know, if you, if you make the rich countries pay, it's just much less likely that they're going to participate. and then there's also a problem which is -- because as a general matter, countries only enter into treaties when it's in their interest. if you say, look, i'm willing to into a climate treaty because down the road the benefits of avoiding climate-related disasters are greater than the short-term costs of reducing emissions. but then you say to this country, by the way, you have to contribute, you know, a few extra billion or trillion dollars because other countries are poor.

a country is not going to join into it because countries don't do that. countries enter into treaties when it's in their national interests. that's how politicians get reelected. they do distribute through foreign aid, and i think that's a good thing, but that's a much better way of helping countries than through a climate treaty where, you know, the u.s. take on more of the burden. because with foreign aid you can deal with problems of redistribution that have been such a, that can be quite challenging. for example, i mean, one of the problems with foreign aid is that, you know, you give money to a bunch of, to a foreign government, and the foreign government is corrupt, and it ends up in the pockets of officials rather than in, than for food for poor people. and so in the foreign aid world people tried to come up with various ways of addressing that problem. well, if you instead redistribute wealth through a climate treaty, by in effect giving subsidy toss a foreign government, then you're back to

this initial problem which is that the money might be lost to corruption rather than going to the benefit of the people live anything that country. so, you know, it's best to try to keep separate these different goals. one goal, deal with global warming. the other goal is help poor people in other countries. and you adopt and pursue different policies for each of those goals. >> host: this is booktv's "in depth" program. we're live from chicago. author and law professor eric posner is our guest. next call comed from if freeland, michigan. please go ahead. >> caller: yes, sir. thank you very much, gentlemen. i'd like to ask, um, about something you talked about a little bit before about the supreme court. um, and the politicizing of it, legislating from the bench, i guess, is the cliche. i mean, since these people are, basically, making political decisions, they're not really

above politics or anything like that. um, shouldn't they -- alan dershowitz and other people have suggested this -- shouldn't they, basically, just be elected like other politicians? wouldn't that make more sense? i was wondering what he thinks of, um, those kinds of ideas. thank you very much. >> guest: yeah. well, interestingly, and in most states, i think, judges are elected including the high court judges in those states who make constitutional decisions. and i do find the idea of electing judges appealing or at least not as outrageous as most lawyers do. and i find it appealing for the reasons that you give. that said, you know, i don't think it would really work for the national government. for one thing we'd have to amend the constitution which would be probably impossible to do. um, for another thing, um, i do think there's a virtue in

shielding the judges from popular pressure. otherwise, you know, although i do agree they're excessively politicized, i think they'd be even more politicized if that happened. i think a more modest, sensible view, sensible reform would be to reduce their terms from high time tenure -- lifetime tenure to 12 years or something like that which is the norm in place like europe and other countries. life tenure is extremely unusual around the world. that, too, would require a constitutional amendment and is probably unrealistic, but that's the sort of reform that i think would be effective. >> host: what do you think the seventh district judge, richard posner, would think of that proposal? >> guest: you know, i don't know. i'm a little wary about saying what i think his views are. so i don't know. i'll have to pass on that question. >> host: eric posner is our guest, law professor and author. here are his books. in 2000 he wrote "law and social

norms." 2009, "the perils of global legalism "came out. the limits of international law, new foundations of cost-benefit analysis, terror in the balance came out in 2007, and then he co-edited a book called "law and happiness." climate change justice in the 2010 as well as the executive unbound came out in 2010. "law and happiness," what does law have to do with happiness? >> guest: well, it doesn't have that much to do with happiness, it maybe has more to do with unhappiness. but there's this movement going on which is quite interesting which, you know, so the government when it passes a law or adopts a policy, it has to think about how it effects people. and often a method they used is called cost-benefit analysis, and they basically figure out how much people would be willing

to pay for this and how much people would be willing to pay to avoid this. so a standard example is, you know, let's shut down some paper mills because they're issuing pollution that's causing harm. in order to decide whether to shut them down or to let them continue to operate, what we look at is how much people would be willing to pay to avoid the harm and compare that to, you know, the higher cost of paper. the happiness approach which has been proposed by psychologists and some economists say you shouldn't look at how much people are willing to pay because, ultimately, that doesn't measure what matters which is their happiness or their subjective well being which is the sense that a person has because their life is going well. and the way subjective well being is measured is through surveys. people are asked, you know, how are you feeling? you know, how are things going on you from a scale of 1-10, and they might write down 7 or 6 or 5, and you look at their

conditions. are they living near a paper mill, for example, or near an airport? and through statistical analysis you can figure out the sorts of things that tend to promote people's happiness and the sorts of things that don't. and in the united kingdom they've actually been quite aggressively pursuing this approach. it's hard to know, you know, what's going to happen, but it is a very interesting alternative to cost benefit analysis which many people have creatized. -- criticized. >> host: cass sunstein was your editor on that book. who is he, and what's your relationship? >> guest: cass sunstein is currently the administrator for the office of information and regulatory affairs or oira. so he's a political appointee of president obama and works in the white house. and, basically, he oversees what the regulatory agencies are doing. and he's one of these people who's actually been a promoter of cost-benefit analysis,

although he has quite a nuanced view of it. he's a friend. he used to be at the university of chicago. he was there when i arrived at the university of chicago in 1998 l. we've written a number of papers together, and we did this book together because we both found this happiness literature quite interesting, and we want today explore its implications for law and policy. >> host: now, have you been at the university of chicago long enough to have a relationship at all with president obama? >> guest: i don't have a relationship with him. i did know him slightly. i went to law school with him, so i knew him a little bit there. and in, although i didn't see him much in the hallways, i did run across him every once in a while on the play ground. so, you know, i talk to him every once in a while. but, you know, we're not pals or anything like that. i wish him well, but i haven't gotten a christmas card from him or anything like that. [laughter] >> host: well, martha barkley e-mails in to you, she lives in

belgrade lakes, maine, in the summer and north charleston, south carolina, in the winter. sandra day o'connor retired, was an internationalist regarding law. she advocated looking at laws in other countries for certain cases before our supreme court. what is the stance of our present supreme court justices regarding this? and i would simply add what do you think about looking at international law when we put an eye toward u.s. law? >> guest: yeah. this has been a big controversy. the current justices who support this approach include justice anthony kennedy, justice breyer, um, and i think justice society my or your -- sotomayor. she said she supported this approach and maybe one or two others. but, basically, the liberal wing of the supreme court. um, cass sunstein and i wrote a paper about, this is one of the papers we wrote. and, you know, i don't think

it's a bad idea as long as it's done in a prudent and narrow way. so just so everybody understands, this controversy arose because certain very high-profile cases, death penalty cases, for example, the supreme court -- and i think usually justice kennedy -- would say, well, you know, this particular practice like, you know, executing people who committed crimes as juveniles or executing people who are mentally retarded, this is something the united states does, but no other country in the world does this. so in interpreting the eighth amendment which bans cruel and unusual punishment, we should take into account the norms as they prevail in other countries. and, you know, this upset a lot of people, especially people who supported the death penalty. and i think partly because this methodology was introduced in such high profile cases, it became instantly controversial. and it's also intentioned with originalism the idea that you should interpret the constitution according to the understanding at the time that it was ratified. but the fact is that, you know,

it is useful to look at what's going on in other countries. it's a useful form of information. and in the united states it happens all the time in the another way. so every state in the country is sovereign in a certain way, each state has its own court system. and the state courts for hundreds of years when trying to resoft difficult -- resolve difficult questions will look at what other courts are doing in other states, and this is a form of borrowing foreign law, at least looking at what other sovereigns are doing in order to help resolve cases under our own law. and i think that's fine as long as, you know, it doesn't just become pretextual for producing an outcome that you support for ideological or political grounds that you don't, you don't want to admit. >> host: eric posner, this tweet from w. kennedy: what's your opinion of the court ruling on citizens united? [laughter] >> guest: well, all right. so this is a little bit outside of, you know, my field. so i'm hesitant to say much

about this. the citizens united was a supreme court case which struck town certain campaign finance laws on first amendment grounds. i'm not a first amendment absolutist. i think there are situations where you want to constrain speech. one that we're all familiar with and have no problem with such as fraud and so forth. and one is a little more sensitive about doing that in the electoral setting. but the people who are worried about money corrupting politics, you know, they've got a point. you don't want to assist them in which the various wealthiest people because of their wealth have more influence than other people do. that said, and i hate to, you know, my mind is being untidy again. but, you know, on the other hand, when the government tries to interfere with the way people spend their money in order to promote ideas, you know, you can, you can have bad outcomes.

so "the new york times" is a wealthy cooperation that's promoting ideas all over the place. we probably don't really want the government to regulate them even though it is a fact that they're wealthy, they have outside influence, and so the opinions of the people who happen to work there and the owners probably have more influence than those of ordinary people. >> host: next call for eric posner comes from indianapolis. good afternoon. >> caller: good afternoon, wonderful. professor, i can listen to you talk all day, you're very interesting. [laughter] but i do have a comment to make regarding at the beginning of the interview when you talked about how the increase in crime, um, was -- well, back in the, i guess, in the later days, um, increasing -- the crime level was low because people in a small town knew each other, and so there was, um, the inability

to operate, you know, engage in criminal activity because you wouldn't be found out. i would say that that's not necessarily, that doesn't hold up because you have instances in inner cities where, you know, crack houses and criminal activity are operating in broad daylight. and people know who the criminals are. but the thing is that they fear retribution from these criminals if they cooperate with the authorities. and they don't feel proper protection from the authorities if they were to speak up. can you speak on that a little bit? >> host: thank you, caller. >> guest: yeah. that's a terrific point. and, you know, i was speaking in kind of generalities. i think it is true that in the 19th century in a small town there wasn't the sort of crime problem that you, that you see today. although there could be all kinds of horrible things going on, you know, it's not illegal. like, you could have, for

example, horrible racial discrimination. so whatever the norms of the town were would prevail because, because people would sort of watch what each other is doing. but you're quite right. in an inner city today, these sorts of things can be reversed. and this is also an explanation for why organized crime, the mafia and so forth has often been very powerful within cities. sometimes organizations like the mafia will supply services to people that they're not getting from the government, so they'll provide support in return and not inform on the criminals. and as you point out in other cases the criminals are just so well organized and so powerful that they can intimidate people and prevent them from cooperating with the authorities. you know, it's a complex, it's a complex problem, and i acknowledge your point which is that in my earlier statement i excessively simplified the reality.

>> host: eric posner, how to you choose what you write about? >> guest: it's, you know, it's what i'm interested in, what seems important and what i know. so if i'm familiar with a field already, it's more likely that i'll be able to make a contribution. >> host: next call comes from portland, oregon. good afternoon to you. >> caller: hello, professor posner. say, john mccain delivered a speech on the senate floor regarding torture, and then he wrote an op-ed piece in "the washington post." in it he said that it wasn't torture, you know, that got us major leads in the intelligence community to find osama bin laden. and then he continued where he said, you know, torture, a

person will say anything his captors want to hear whether it's true or false if he believes it will relieve his suffering. did you talk to john mccain? would you comment on his position, and also doesn't this, doesn't this put in harm's way american military personnel who are in the combat theater in jeopardy if they are taken as prisoner? thank you. >> host: thank you, caller. >> guest: yeah. yeah, you know, there's, yes, there's debate about whether torture contributed to osama bin laden's capture. it's not a very edifying spectacle. i think the answer is, you know, we don't know, you know, maybe not. i have no idea personally, and as i said earlier, i don't think the bush administration ever made a good case that torture

was necessary. and i think part of the problem is that the bush administration relatively early on sacrificed a lot of its credibility, and so when it made certain assertions, one didn't know whether to believe it or not. i don't agree with mccain's argument that a person will say anything under torture. i just don't think that's right. you know, people are constantly being threatened by criminals, you know, what's your atm number? if you don't tell me your atm number, i'm going to hurt you. what to you do? you give him your atm number. so at least intuitively it seems to me that it's reasonable to believe using force to get information from people is going to work. maybe not very often, maybe just sometimes. again, i don't know, these are complicated questions. i've spoken to some people in the u.s. military who do interrogation including a colonel who's the head of, i think he's the head of

interrogation in the air force. he's very much against torture. he thinks it's horrible, he made very powerful argument that it should never be used under any circumstances. but he did say, you know, u.s. forces sometimes when when, you know, they weren't authorized to will, you know, beat up people in order to get information out of them. it works which is why they do it, right? which is why it's a problem for him and why he has to work very hard in order to persuade the people that in the long term it's much better not to use force, it's much better to use rah port. so these are problems i don't have any particular insight in, and i'm happy to defer to the judgment of john mccain or this person i spoke to in the army or experts. and i counderstand most experts -- i do understand most experts don't think that torture is used very well. i think it might be used in the most extreme circumstances. and john mccain agreed about that. he was asked, well, what be you

have a ticking time bomb situation? he said, oh, well, in that case maybe it would be justified, and that's sort of my view as well. >> host: so is that the same cob collusion you -- conclusion you reach in "terror in the balance," your 2007 book? >> i think i've become a little more cautious than i was in the book. the book was written in a somewhat more abstract level than defending the bush administration. we were mainly interest inside the question about why -- what was interesting about mccain's view was he thought torture should be illegal, nonetheless, he thought it was prop tore use in the extreme circumstance of the ticking time bomb. and that's kind of puzzling pause if you tell people it's illegal, they're not going to use it. why not tell american officials it's illegal except when you have the ticking time bomb? so this kind of academic issue was really what the focus was of the book. and in the book i think in

retrospect maybe we were a little bit too casual about the, you know, the difficulties of the issues. which i do -- i think it's difficult and, you know, it's not the sort of decision i would want to have to make. >> host: william mcrae from seattle e-mails in to you: professor posner, you claim the bush administration didn't exercise any more executive power than other administrations. however, you exposed your allegiances when you failed to mention the massive number of cheney/bush signing statements. those absolved them of legal liability from the bills the president signed. why is this not a form of tyranny of the executive? >> >> guest: yeah. i actually wrote a whole paper about signing statements. not the sort of thing that people would want to read, it's very technical. but to answer the question, signing statements are a funny little tempest in the teapot. they don't actually have any

legal effect as a practical matter, so if somebody breaks a law and the person's brought before court and the judge, you know, is told here's the law, and by the way, the president issued this signing statement saying this law's invalid, the judge would ignore that. it doesn't have any legal standing. so what a signing statement is, you might think of it as kind of a memo to the executive branch, you know, this is the president's understanding of what the law is. and you and the executive branch take this into account as you go about your business. because the signing statements that the bush administration issued are kind of vague, i mean, they're a lot like sort of rhetorical or political exercises, i don't know of any incidence where you actually could trace some kind of abuse of executive action to any particular signing statement. so the bush administration issued these signing statements. they're troublesome in some

respects. in some case they were based on very aggressive interpretations of presidential power. but, you know, bush got these interpretations, or his lawyers got these interpretations from previous presidents. so you can find the same interpretations and signing statements issued by president clinton or president reagan. it's in that sense there's more continuity here than rupture. >> host: next call comes from paynesville, ohio. you're on the air. >> caller: yeah. they just arrested a serbian war criminal who committed crime against bosnian citizens in bosnian territory in violation of bosnian law, but instead of having his trial in bosnia, they're having one in the netherlands with a very possible judge and jury that has no bosnian -- which seems like a big overreach. if there isn't such a law, shouldn't there be a law that says you can't have an

international war crimes trial without having a local one first? is. >> host: thank you, caller. >> guest: you know, that's a very complex and important question, and the court that is trying this fellow whose name is mladic is called the international tribunal for the former yugoslavia. the established back in the 1990s during the yugoslav civil wars, and it was established precisely because there was no domestic, there were no domestic trials of people like mladic, and the reason there weren't is because there was a civil war going on. so the bosnians who are committing war crimes or the zerbes who were create -- serbs who were committing war crimes were committing crimes in other countries, right? the serbing didn't want to prosecute their own people because they thought, maybe they approved, maybe they didn't approve, but they were their guys. so this tribunal was set up precisely in order to insure that these people would,

ultimately, be prosecuted. now, the tribunals are models on the nuremberg tribunals. there's no jury, it's just a bunch of international judges. and a number of people are concerned that when you have an international court like this, you're not going to have adequate procedural protections with the result that, you know, maybe innocent people will be convicted, although it's very hard to believe that mladic is innocent. that's the trade-off that you make. this is, you know, right at the heart of the debates about international law. if you leave everything just to the countries, the countries may not do the right thick. they may not -- thing. they may not prosecute war criminals who have caused harm to people in other countries. but if you have the international system do it, then people, their trials might be influenced by fact factors that are unrelated to what they actually did, there might be international politics or international power relations that influence the outcomes. >> host: now, professor posner, either in the limits of

international law or the perils of global legalism, you wrote about nuremberg, and, essentially, paraphrasing you said the successful. but at the same time you said the settlement with tokyo after world war ii was not as successful. why, what was the difference? >> well, you know, as a matter of sort of historical understanding, i think most historians think nuremberg was successful and the tokyo tribunals were not success. why? because the nuremberg tribunals went on for much longer, there's really just a couple trials coming in after the war in japan. there was a very negative reaction to the tribunals in japan which suggests that, you know, made people think that it was just victor's justice. and the japanese were not imprettied by these -- impressed by these tribunal, they were not

sort of persuaded that japan had done anything worse than what the other countries had done. now, you know, the war about nuremberg is, in fact, the germans were impressed by the tribunal. actually, at the time they weren't. they thought it was just victor's justice as well. but i think over the years the germans have come to see that the nuremberg tribunal was justified because the nazis were uniquely horrible. the japanese did a lot of horrible things, but not on the scale of the nazis. and in many ways what japan did was the sort of thing that countries had been doing, you know, for centuries. and it was -- one thing that was troublesome about both nuremberg and tokyo tribunals is the allies provided an advance that we would not be prosecuting, right? so even though americans and british and certainly the soviets committed war crimes, that was just off the table which did make it look like victor's justice. i think that was less of a problem with nuremberg because the nazi really did seem

uniquely bad. but it was more of a problem in japan where, after all, americans had dropped the atomic bomb. one could make the argument that, yes, the japanese started the war, but in terms of the atrocities committed during the war, both sides were in pretty bad shape. >> host: asheville, north carolina, please go ahead with your question or comment for author eric posner. >> caller: yes, thank you for taking my call. i have two questions. the first question is leading up to the football bubble that blew -- to the financial bubble that blew up in 2008, the rating agencies were rating all this paper as aaa. everyone knows there's only so much commercial paper that can be rated as aaa. my question is, why were none of these people that were doing this charade ever prosecuted? and my second question is, what are your views on the recent

supreme court decision that allows corporate entities to, basically, contribute boundless money to elections, political campaignses? i personally -- >> host: thank you. asheville, thank you. professor posner, talked about the citizens united case a little earlier, i think that's what he was referring to. >> >> guest: right. you know, the short answer is it's not clear they violated any criminal laws. the people who raided -- i mean, there are lots of, you know, actors involved many of whom did things that were maybe unethical or certainly dwell. but if you take the rating, you know, they were giving their opinion on how safe they thought these assets were. it's hard -- there's no evidence that they knew that the assets were riskier and, nonetheless, gave them very high ratings. the best evidence is that they

were full of, like, virtually everybody else, most people thought these assets were safe. most individual, most investment banks, governments, you know, everybody. and they thought they were safe because they believed that the models that had been developed to evaluate their riskiness was accurate. >> host: your co-author in "the limbs of international -- the limits of international law," jack gold season smith. who is her? >> caller: he used to be a professor at the university of chicago law school which is how i know him. he was in the, he was the head of the office of legal counsel in the bush administration, and he's, he's most well known for having, um, repudiated the torture memo that had been issued by the department of justice which had held that certain forms of coercive interrogation were, did not violate u.s. law. and also for -- repudiating may

be too strong a word, but i guess withdrawing and sort of advising another memo that had to do with surveillance. >> host: this e-mail from austin williams, could you please discuss the concept and practice of federalism as it has changed over time? does the current desire in some quarters for a return to federalism represent a healthy trend to increase freedom or a complete misunderstanding of our history? >> guest: federalism is the principle that the states rather than the national government will, you know, control a substantial amount of u.s. policy. of course, the national government's going to control defense and regulate the national economy, but people think that the states should, you know, regulate as much as possible. so, you know, one example would be abortion. federalists think states just come up with whatever abortion policy they want from a complete ban to liberal rules, and a

person who's critical of federalism might say, well, that's the sort of thing the national government should determine. so federalism was a very important principle back when the constitution was ratified in the 18th century. my view is that it's much more difficult to sustain in modern times because, basically, as a result of technological changes and communication and transportation, we have more of a national market. we have more of a nation than we did at the time. so whenever a state regulates, the problem is that its regulations will cause perverse effects to neighboring states. that is one of the costs of federalism. that's more of a problem than it was in the 18th century, and i think this is just a trend that one has to recognize. now, having said that, in many parts of the world country are sort of actually coming apart. people don't like it when they're regulated by a distant government which seems unaccountable, and that leads to a resurgence of federalism.

my view, though, is that in this country this type of feeling is probably pretty limited. there have been eruptions of this. there was one at the beginning of the reagan administration as well. but the fact is that most of the problems, the things that we're really worried about, health care, the financial systems, security, the environment are things that have to be regulated at the federal level because they are nation, they're national problems, they're not problems. >> host: are you a member of the federalist society? is. >> guest: no. >> host: was that founded at the university of chicago? >> guest: no, it wasn't. i'm not really sure about the details, but i think it was founded by a number of professors from different universities, and i guess it has an office in if washington. it's not part of any particular university. >> host: next call comes from fort mojave, arizona. hi. >> caller: hi. professor posner, i'd like your comments on subject matter of activity that creates criminal

activity or tends to do something to accelerate criminal activity, and i'm thinking specifically about drug laws that criminalize possession and use of chemicals that in and of themselves is not harmful per se, it's not drug possession and use, it's not like murder or theft or rape or something like -- and no other person is harmed by the specific use of drugs. and, in fact, as i understand it, it's not -- one needs not to prove that when one is under the influence of a drug, that that person is at that time, that's some kind of a state of immediate threat to the health and safety of the public. so, and i particularly would like your focus on how this might operate in minority sections; black ghettos,

hispanic communities where these kinds of problems are accelerate ed, from my understanding. >> host: professor? >> guest: well, again, you know, it's not something i've done much work on, and i'm a little hesitant to give my views which are not particularly informed. but, you know, i think the point that the caller is making is that drug use is often called a victimless crime. it might harm you, like cigarette smoking, but is that a reason to make it illegal? you know, i don't know. i think it's a tough problem. we have an era of prohibition in this country which is based on the same theory as drug illegalization. although we generally let people do what they want, certain types of addictions maybe are so harmful to the people that the government should get involved or maybe they have these third party effects that may lead to

destruction of the families and the communities. i don't have strong instincts about whether drugs should be legal or not. i guess i'm conservative enough to think that unless we have, you know, very powerful evidence that drug regulation is, you know, extremely harmful, we should probably continue with the current system. i am uncomfortable about the very long sentences that are given to people, however. >> host: i think it was in your book, "new foundations of cost-benefit analysis," that you wrote about marriage and gay marriage. and doug robinson from new york city e-mails in. the 1996 federal defense of marriage act provided that no state would be required to recognize a same-sex marriage from another state. and also defined marriage for federal law purposes as opposite sex. if we are a country which protects the rights of the minorities over the majority, doesn't this act seem unfair and violates the constitutional

rights of lesbian and gay americans? >> guest: yeah, you know, i think the act is unfair. i didn't support it. i don't really see the reason for it. i think states, this is the sort of thick -- i mean, i think this is the sort of thing that states should decide on their own taking into account the values and needs of people living in the state. i think it's a little glib to say, well, you know, because we protect the interests of minorities in this country, it follows that you have to allow gay marriage because, you know, as a majority of constitutional law, that's not the case. often we do not protect minority interests. the minority interests have to be powerful enough and the group lacks political power to insert interest in the legislate they've arena. in fact, gay and lesbian groups are politically quite powerful, they've been very success.

, and i think there's reason to believe they will continue to be successful. so, you know, my instinct is that there's not a strong argument for judicial intervention, but, you know, it may be justified. it's hard to say. >> host: next call for eric posner comes from bellville, illinois. good afternoon to you. >> caller: good afternoon. thanks for taking my call. professor posner, i was one of your students at the george mason university law and economics program in california, and you were excellent. and it's great to hear you again. my question is, what is your opinion and critique of the international criminal court, and do you think that we should ratify the treaty and be participants in it? >> guest: okay. so the international criminal court is a court that was set up in 1999. it went into operation in 2002. and what it's supposed to do is,

um, be a court that can hear charges against anybody anywhere in the world for violating an international crime. genocide, a violation of the laws of war and so forth. i've been critical of this court. i understand the humanitarian impulse behind it. it's just not clear to me that it makes sense or that it would work in the manner that is intended. and here is why. so when we have domestic -- we have criminal courts in a domestic system. and i think to a degree that people don't usually recognize these courts rely a great deal on discretion, on the discretion of prosecutors, on the discretion of judges, on the juries. um, you can't set up a system of rules that's just going to operate like a machine on its own. you need people to make judgments. and the reason the criminal justice system in the united states works, you know, pretty well, quite well by

international standards, is that, you know, basically, people agree on what should be criminal, under what circumstances maybe criminal behavior should be excused. and so the system works relatively smoothly. so a court system is only effective if it's surrounded by a network of institutions staffed by people who have, you know, basically, similar values. and you need other, you need a legislature to change the law when they're no longer working so well, and you need an -- it's very complicated. and, you know, it's taken centuries for this kind of system to evolve. well, there's no international government, so the international criminal court is just kind of floating there by it. it has its own prosecutor as well as it own judicial system, and the -- because, you know, international crimes are being committed constantly everywhere, all around the world, the prosecutor, you know, unavoidably has an enormous amount of discretion to decide

where to focus his energies. and this is very dangerous because people in different countries will think that they're being picked on. there's no way, you know, to show ha you're acting in a dis-- that you're acting in this a dispassionate or impartial way. so you can create very problematic political tensions, the institution can, because it's not tied to, like, a democratic political base. and so the problem has already arisen in africa. so far, you know, the international criminal court has only pursued prosecutions in africa. now, in many cases the countries actually invited the court, but once the court has gotten involved, it's been very difficult for the country to say, you know, we've changed our mind. amnesty might make sense. and african countries are now saying why are you picking on us? why don't you go after the americans or europeans or chinese? this is intended to undermine

the legitimacy of the court. i think under these circumstances there's probably a good reason for the united states not to join, although i think the u.s. has been sensible and pragmatic so far in giving support to the international criminal court in situations where u.s. policy interests are at stake. ..

>> guest: getting appointed people who you want and to a majority of the senate supports. and you know, i think the benefit of the filibuster is it means they have more moderate judges, fewer judges who are pulling strings. that's probably a good thing. the cost of the filibuster is that probably somehow qualified people will not be appointed to the court, and that's troubling. i guess in the end i don't find the filibuster, judicial filibuster bothersome. >> host: please comment, another tweet, please comment on the patriot act and judicial review or lack thereof. >> guest: yes, the patriot act

was a statute enacted in the wake of 9/11 which gave, which gave the government certain powers to investigate and pursue people that it hadn't had before. it's kind of a grab bag of powers to engage in certain types of searches and so forth. a lot of these things were things that were justified by technological changes, the switch from analog to digital technology and so forth. some of them were more troublesome. i thought at the time it was justified for the simple reason that after 9/11, it seemed to me that 9/11 suggested that there was more of a threat to americans from foreign terrorist than there had been before. and it hadn't been prevented. we should give government more powers to go after suspected terrorists than the government had before. it's very hard to know how exactly the balance liberties

and security, but it seemed unlikely that the ballots had an effect correctly. and so, i think on the whole the patriot act was sensible, although once -- at the time i think people were troubled by it. there were a lot of some wild accusations that it was unconstitutional, and i don't believe that any of that panned out. i think the court said this is fine, the patriot act, it doesn't infringe on any constitutional rights. >> host: next call for eric posner comes from rockaway beach, oregon. i. >> caller: hi. my question is about article one section nine. it give our current ability to create 1913. we created the federal reserve. since then the federal bank has been infringe on a march or policy. could we democratize this by going back to the 1913 law,

putting the federal reserve under the treasury? so the money power belongs to the people and not the private banks. it seems we're headed towards that imf style policy with tax our health benefits, social security and education. >> guest: yeah, that's a great question. i just taught a class on the federal reserve board, so this stuff is in my mind. and i can think about it a lot. i don't think it's angry to say that monetary policy was privatized because of the federal reserve board, it's a public institution. the members of the board of governors are all appointed by the president with senate confirmation. they are the people with most of the power. the president of the federal reserve bank, that's more complicated. i don't want to go into details although i suspect the caller may have those people in my. banks have some influence over their appointment. the fairest conclusion is it's a

legitimate public agency. you might say, the question might be, well, should congress make monetary policy rather than as independent agency? that would be more democratic. you know, that may be a good idea. in great britain, for example, they have a central bank but traditionally it have to get permission from the cabinet, which is responsible to the parliament. so it may not, it may work. the usual concern is that elected politicians are at least worried about the next election so if they have control over monetary policy, they would inflate the money supply in order to great kind of an artificial boom, just during the election. but the result, the economy will boom briefly, people will vote for the incumbent. but then when you do that over the long-term you cause serious problems with the economy. that was the reason for getting

a story to an independent agency in the first place. but it's possible that congress would behave more responsible than that. we don't know because it's never been tried. before the federal reserve act, monetary policy kind of decentralized, but i guess i would be nervous about doing that. i think on the whole, the federal reserve board has done a pretty good job with world war ii in managing the monetary supply. it hasn't made series enough mistakes to justify abolishing it and trying some of the institutional approach. >> host: newport beach california, you're on with author and law professor eric posner. >> caller: my question is about torture. torture has been around since human history, but hear people talk about it today in light of the war on terror, it seems to me that it is treated like a new and unfamiliar activity.

and my question is, how could this be? it seems to me to be a pretty well understood activity, and i'm wondering why there's so much debate about it. my own view is that the application of it is basically for punitive reasons, and that the intelligence values are simply a smokescreen to hide this from roy vicious motives, of people who want to do that. i would like to which you have to say about it. thank you. >> guest: it's possible. you know, if it doesn't have any value, as i said before, i don't really, it's a complicated question. if it doesn't have value for actually preventing lots of people from being harmed it should be abolished immediately. and it is hardly possible that people, maybe in other countries more than in this country use torture in a punitive way rather than due to obtain information. i don't know.

my reading of history is that any practice that survived for centuries and centuries is probably, the people who do it probably find it useful. they are not crazy enough to engage in a practice that is actually perverse and makes it harder for them to govern. watch changed i think is value, and particularly since world war ii, people -- well, i would say starting with the enlightenment and and particularly since world war ii. people come to think of torture as a horrible thing to do to other people, and you know, i agree. i agree. i think that's what almost all circumstances the should be appointed. >> host: just to follow-up on that, this is from daniel in texas, and e-mail. would doctor posner be willing to comment on the legal reasoning of the torture memos written a john woo and jay bybee? >> guest: john wood and jay

bybee, i read an op-ed about them, and it's complicated. in one sense the memos are not very good. debt ridden kind of a sloppy way, and the authors make claims about executive power that are controversial without acknowledging their controversial. and in other ways make the sorts of arguments that make lawyers cringe. lawyers write legal argument to try to be as narrow and careful as possible. but i do think that they receive more grief than justified because the executive, what they were riding a traditional executive branch jurisprudence, they were in the justice department. they were not judges for example. the justice department lawyers have traditionally advanced aggressive interpretation of executive power. these include people like antonin scalia who is now supreme court justice, and all kinds of people distinguished

and not so distinguished going back sentries. these people tried to be good lawyers for their clients, come up with legal arguments that would justify what their clients want to do. and so you -- they could draw on this proud secular interpretation of statutes and constitutional law. law, to justify the use of interrogation. you might say this is just terrible, these people shouldn't be riding in this sort of slanted way, but then you should criticize all the lawyers in the office of legal council going back a long time. i don't think they behaved that different from their predecessors. during the clinton administration, for example, very fine lawyers in the office of legal council. they didn't justify torture but they did justify unilateral american military intervention in other countries which is also hard to justify based on what the constitution says, it says there has to be a declaration of

war in the war powers act which says you have to inform congress to get their consent after a certain period of time has passed. the same sort of very strong arguments say these rules, but we can interpret them narrowly and light of the president traditional executive power. so, if you take that context into account, i think the number is less shocking, you know, less extreme than it appeared to people. drama this is booktv's "in depth" program. our monthly series with one author featuring his or her body of work. eric posner, law professor and author is our guest live from chicago. we've got about an hour left in our program today. be right back. ♪ ♪

>> host: and we continue live from chicago with author eric posner on this month's "in depth." professor posner, we were just showing our viewers some of your favorite authors and greatest influences et cetera. i want to start with one of your favorite authors, nietzsche. >> guest: nietzsche, he was this german philosopher living in the 19th century. why is he my favorite authors? he writes beautifully and something to aspire to. he is highly critical of conventional norms and views.

and when i read them in my 20s it was inspiring because you felt like you could say anything. if you felt you were right and you thought carefully enough about something, you could be, you know, you are free to make those arguments. he has a kind of irreverent streak and critical streak. >> host: what about nihilism? >> guest: i don't think he was a nihilist. and i'm not a nihilist. i do think he was skeptical about enlightenment values, and in particular a kind of enlightenment view that through reason we can build an institution that will solve our problems. and that, consistent with my sense of things, he articulates it a particularly powerful way. >> host: who is samuel moyne who you're currently reading his

book the last utopia, human rights? tragic he's a historian and he wrote an interesting book about human rights. the book is a fairly academic book that argues that the rise of the human rights movement should be dated to the 1970s rather than to early appeared with conventional wisdom. i'm interested in human rights as an academic topic. i've been writing about it a lot so his book was a natural book for me to read. >> host: 202-624-1111 if you live in the eastern/central time zones. 202-624-1115 for those of you in the mountain/pacific time zones. or send us an e-mail, booktv@c-span.org, or you can send a tweet, twitter.com/booktv, or at booktv is our handle. you list as your greatest

influence, professor posner, stephen chevelle and cass sunstein. >> well, steven shavell is a harvard law professor who i had in law school, and you know come in the first year of law school you learn a lot of law and it's not always clear why one rule makes sense rather than another rule. and i would just use a very simple example. in great britain, if you bring a lawsuit and you lose you have to pay the attorneys seize on the other side. whereas in the united states if you bring a lawsuit, you pay your own attorneys he and the other pot -- of the site pays their attorney fees regardless of who wins. a natural thing to ask is why, which rule is better? maybe the british rule is bad and we should accept it. i thought steven shavell was very clear about the different cost of benefits. he applied the kind of cost-benefit analysis. and he writes very clearly, so i

modeled a lot of my scholarship after his, although his is much more mathematical and i tend not to use mathematics. cass sunstein we've talked about before. he's just a very admirable person. he is so committed to scholarly enterprise. that is quite inspiring. now, in public he's written controversial things, and this is got a lot of attention. when you public office people get upset about that sort of thing. that's the world we live in, but for an academic it's important to say controversial things, to be provocative, to question received wisdom and not to worry that people will get upset at you for doing this. and i think he is a very good example. >> host: we spent the last almost two hours reviewing some of your writings. do you find yourself politically in agreement with them? >> guest: i agree with him about something.

i think generally speaking is more liberal than i am. but read right where we agree about something. about climate change for example, that's something we agree about and where we disagree, you know, we're not going to write. >> host: again, show you some of professor posner's books so you can get an idea of what he writes about if you're just tuning in. "law and social norms" was his first book. it came out in 2000. "the perils of global legalism," 2009. "the limits of international law," 2005. "new foundations of cost-benefit analysis." "terror in the balance" came out in 2007. "climate change justice" and "the executive unbound" both came out in 2010. back to your calls, tweets and

e-mails. we will start with sarasota, florida. >> caller: my name is candace. good afternoon, professor posner. my question is, international law ideas about sharia law coming into the united states and which would trump which. how would you imagine sharia law and international law and the united states constitutional law? thank you very much. >> guest: scheuer. sharia law doesn't have any legal standing in the united states. so the only law of course the courts will enforce indian estates is law that's enacted by legislatures, and the common law, the, a judge made law. the result of millions of judicial opinions year after year after year, interpreting previous traditional opinions. it's kind of customary law. sharia law is never quite --

either legislation or in common law adjudication. now, you know, i think is a bit of a controversy floating around. i forget the source of the controversy. it may be someone, you know, i'm cautiously said under certain circumstances sharia law might be recognized in u.s. courts. there's a very limited set of circumstances where american courts will enforce foreign law. this is pretty technical stuff, and it's pretty dull so i will keep it short. but basically suppose there's a dispute between two people in morocco. suppose those two people end up in the united states and they bring a lawsuit against each other in the united states. so the american court has to perform what's called choice of law, to figure what sort of law should regulate their behavior. if it's a contractual dispute should be to contract law of the state in which they bring their dispute in osha to be the

contract law of morocco? and so, courts for hundreds of years have been enforcing foreign law in these circumstances. although again, usually because somebody has are both parties have very strong contacts with the foreign country. you know, generally speaking this has been uncontroversial. after all, it's too americans are in morocco and they have dispute, that start indian estates we've got the moroccan courts to apply american law. as opposed to moroccan law. moroccan law is not sharia law so i don't want to be misunderstood by that. there are conceivable circumstances where some foreign country has incorporated sharia law into their own law and that might be appropriate for those rules to apply to some kind of dispute between people in those countries to end up in the united states. that might be okay. i have no problem with it. i don't think any lawyer would have any problem with that. >> host: professor posner, this is from frank arena the

meaning and, good afternoon, please comment on what he believes is the ever-growing creativeness of prosecutors, in particular the case of senator john edwards. >> guest: well, that seems like a loaded question, but let's see. so, you know, the question draws on a legitimate concern that's been going on for a long time in which is prosecutors have too much discretion. and prosecutors to have an enormous amount of discretion because there's so many laws out there and it's hard to do much without violating, particularly if you're a business or even a politician. politicians are led to receive money for the campaign, but maybe not for personal reasons, but sometimes it's hard to draw the distinction. these are tough questions and that's what you have the courts to sort them out. prosecutors, they have so much

power to draw people into the court in the first place which can be a horrible experience, but it's possible we should be worried about what they are doing. is a very complicated debate. i don't know enough about the edwards case, but what i've read in a newspaper would suggest that the argument that he violated a law to regulate the use of campaign donations. but i don't know enough about the facts of the case to comment on a. >> host: next call comes from las vegas. >> caller: good afternoon. yes, professor posner, i'd like to ask you about, there's a book called the unspoken alliance by an author named sasha. in fact, booktv did a big thing on him about six months ago. and i don't know if your family with this book but it basically documents the history of israel's support of the apartheid government in south africa, mostly for the '70s,

the '70s and '80s. and it demonstrates that he was the first person to go into the south african archives. he found out what was really going on between israel and south africa, and he maintained that israel was trying to sell a nuclear bomb to south africa via sharon peres in 1973 come and that fell through because basically israel was asking too much money for it but to all kinds of huge -- >> host: what's your question for professor posner? >> caller: especially as a jew i'm outraged but i would like to ask you, don't you think the issue should be massive, massive reparations to the black people of south africa who are obviously, you know, terribly injured by this for 20 years? i understand a lot of countries were supportive of apartheid, but shouldn't israel of all countries in the world know

better than to support an not detect a government like that? and they're so aggressively friendly to these people. >> host: professor posner, what, with your expertise in the law, how do you respond to that? >> guest: i do know the details of this. i was under the impression that there was some kind of collaboration between israel and south africa to create a nuclear bomb. israel has a nuclear bomb. they created this nuclear bomb because they feared that they're going to be attacked and then destroyed. i don't know the degree of collaboration. i don't know whether south africans were harmed or not, so i don't want to accept the premise of the question because i haven't read this book and i'm not inform. the broader question though, which is a good one, is what do you do when countries collaborate or cooperate with countries that do horrible things to their people? now now, the united states, you know, far worse than israel has been collaborate with horrible countries for a long time.

and it was always a reason for it. during the cold war the united states would come operate with support, dictatorships in central america and south america and africa and so forth. and it wasn't because the u.s. want to cause harm to these people in this country's or want to exploit them. they just thought we're in this war with the soviet union. the soviet union is doing the same thing with other country. if we say look, you've got to become like us, a democracy, comply with human rights, you know, if we're going to put a military base on your soil than the countries all does go to the soviet union and the united states and its allies would be more isolated. so this is -- these are the hard questions one has to address in international relations. if you think you're under in significant enough threat and your values are at stake him you're going to have to make a compromise. in a way the most famous was the u.s. alliance with the soviet union during world war ii, and

the theory was the soviets did horrible things to their own people and to other people in other countries, but the nazis were worse and we could defeat the soviet -- and we couldn't buy ourselves. the cooperation was justified. now, the story to tell that israel is correct, it's basically the same logic. one would have to evaluate it on its own merits. what were the risk is real legitimate face, what with arms if any, that resulted, and then you have to come up with some moral judgment. >> host: eric posner, if for one to read "the perils of global legalism," what would they conclude about the future of international law and your views on that? >> guest: the future is bleak, i guess, or it's not as rosy as many advocates and supporters believe it is.

this is not a new view. this goes back a long time. sort of skepticism about whether international law and international institutions can really solve the most problems like war and today, climate change. that doesn't mean that international bodies me and it's not that under certain circumstance. international trade law has been helpful in bringing down trade barriers and increasing the well being of people both in our country and in poor countries. and there are other areas of international law, international cooperation that are quite effective. what i'm skeptical about is this kind of utopian view that we are progressing steadily toward a system of the international rule of law as is it is often put, where countries will be held accountable for the harms that they inflict on their own citizens or on other countries. you know, i just don't see that

happening in the foreseeable future. >> host: this e-mail from david, a ph.d student at the indiana university of pennsylvania on the professor posner, i have cited you as a source in the paper i'm working on about trademark and copyright. you wrote a paper entitled win is parity fair use? my question is, how do you feel about companies like disney removing fictional characters that were once part of the public domain, like the fairytale character snow white, and copywriting and/or trademarking them in order to control the way in which they are used in the media? ..

>> caller: and according to your logic, one state says blacks can't get married and another state says jews can't get married. >> guest: that's in the standard arming that's been made by supporters of a kind of a constitutional right, a right to gay marriage, and obviously that would be extremely bad, and i wouldn't support that. it comes down to where do you

draw the line? what if people started making claims, for example, to plural marriage, and that's probably not going to happen, but one still has to think about that in terms of the principle. do we say, the way people want to conduct their lives is entirely their own business and the state should never get involved. you could make that argument. then you could say there are no restrictions unless maybe it causes harm to there'd party. that's not the way our constitutional traditions are. the state has a traditional right to regulate marriage. in fact major is a legal construct to some extent. they've been doing this for hundreds of years, and you should at least hesitate before you tell the states to stop or to radically change a practice that has been -- that is in a way part of our identity.

i'm not opposed to gay marriage. i thought it should be something that state legislatures should decide. you make a good argument that the state legislature might make bad decisions decisions and judl intervention is justified. i wish i could say there is a simple answer to this but there isn't. >> host: we're live from the book festival, and we have a question from our audience. >> caller: my. >> my name is mike. you answered two questions between the state and the administrative power. you said the growth has enabled executive power to rise, and the other you kind of dealt with a technical question regarding the federal reserve. you touched on democratic

accountability. me question is, what are your views? do you a cost benefit analysis where some tradeoff of democratic accountability is acceptable if there are corresponding benefits. >> guest: that's my view. a cost benefit analysis. although not the sort of one you reduce to dollars. but, yes, this is a general point. as the country gets bigger and the level of government rises-it becomes more possible for the government to supply certain types of goods, what economists call public goods. a clean environment, security, regulation of trade, prevention of fraud. that can all be done more efficiently because they're economy of scale. the larger things are, the more effective the government can be. as that happens people become more remote to their government

and they have less influence on policy. and that's correct. policy reflects the average views of earn -- everybody in this country, and in smaller countries you have different policy that reflects peoples view. my view is over the last 100 years, because of the reduction in communication and transportation costs there have been greater and greater benefits from having a lot of scale, from having big countries with very centralized government, and i think people -- now, you could still say that whatever these benefits are, you lose too much and we should have a more democratic system. i think if you just look at what's happened, people acquiesced in this. people seem to think it's working. there are backlashes from time to time, but generally speaking people feel more prosperous and safer in a large centralized system than they would if we

still lived in a highly federal system with a weak executive. >> host: eric posner is teaching at law school conducive to writing? >> guest: yes, it is. teaching and research go together very well because, as you do research you get ideas on how to teach, and as you teach, students ask questions you hadn't thought of, and that helps you come up with research topics that are worth writing about. >> host: after are you graduated from law school, did you good right into teaching? >> guest: i practiced for a couple years. >> host: what kind of law? >> guest: i was in the justice department for a couple years. you talk about the office of legal counsel, i was exposed to constitutional law. >> host: under? >> guest: under george herbert walker bush and clinton, over the transition. >> host: what drew you to teaching? >> guest: well, i think

practicing law is fun, and i've done a little bit since i've become a professor from time to time. there's a lot at stake, and it's interesting. but what's frustrating is you get a little issue and you have to address it -- or a problem, and then you move on and you can't think about it deeply. what i like at academia, you can spend months or years getting to the bottom of some problem. >> host: who should go to law school? >> guest: well, i think you have to find law appealing. i don't think it's a good idea to good law school just because you think it pays well and it's secure, because it may not pay well indefinitely, and it's not clear it's that secure anymore. but i think people thinking about going to law school should do some research. most legal practice is not like what you see on tv. at it -- it's not arguing in courtroom.

it involves giving advice to clients, and helping to structure contracts or deals, and people should try to figure out whether this sort of activity is interesting or not to them. >> host: this e-mail from pontiac, michigan. what is your opinion of justices antonen in scalia, elena kagan, and others associated with the university of chicago? >> guest: i think -- well, i'm not going to answer -- it's awkward to talk about one0s own father. i think easterbrook is interesting. i find him incredibly impressive thinker. i think, scalia, there's a lot to like and not to like. i income the -- i think in the

long wrong he will be remembered as a person with important ideas. kagan, too soon to del. dianne wood, i don't know her work but she is high re -- respected by people i touch. >> host: is the university of chicago special in a way? >> guest: i think it's special. the university of chicago is deeply committed to research, and the people there tend to be very serious about research. although some people are accused of having ideological agendas, and economists are accused of that. that not fair. they have the political views like everybody else. what is special about the university is the central focus is scholarship and research and people take it very seriously. >> host: about 30 minutes left

with our guest, eric posner, for this month's in depth live from chicago. >> guest: hi there. professor possessor in, thank you. my question is about global warming. i have thought that many scientist pointed out that the computer models which were the basis of global warming were imperfect, many facts left out, and i understand many of the original people who are on the i.p.c.c. have asked to have their names removed, and also that thousands of scientists, i think a couple years ago, signed a paper in which they believed that the theory of global warming had much left before it could be proved. my question to you is, do you think recommending policies which are going to have profound influence on the lives of our people, the economy, the growth of our nation, its production,

et cetera, should be based on a theory -- i think you've written a book, the validity of which is in question. thank you, and i really appreciate c-span book. thank you. >> guest: well, from a law prove, not a geophysicist, and i have to go on what the experts say, and my understanding is that there is a scientific consensus. >> i know the caller disagrees -- there's a global warming and it's caused by human activity. the science, as far as i'm concerned as a nonscientist, to fine it persuasive. science is messy and individual scientist sometimes say is not cautious, and scientific progress goes in fits and starts, and people make

mistakes. i suppose it's conceivable it could turn out that the scientists are wrong about climate change. i think there's enough consensus it makes sense for policymakers to act on the assumption that it's a real and serious problem. and i do think, if you look at what the government does, i mean there's a lot -- it does a lot of stuff based on science, which is imperfect as it always is. you need to regulate, and you can't wait -- sometimes you just can't wait until there's a scientific consensus. you have to make a judgment that a problem is serious enough, that even if there's -- it's possible that it turns out not to be really a problem, it's likely enough that we're justified in going forward with some sort of regulation. >> host: eric posner, is cost benefit analysis only an economic argument?

>> guest: it's an economic method. it has to be judged on moral grounds. it's a method that regulatory agencies in the united states use to evaluate possible regulations. so, for example, should -- also while ago at the beginning of the bush administration, a controversy at been epa regulation that would reduce the amount of arsenic in water supplies. you can't get the amount of arsenic down to zero, and arsenic at low levels aren't going to hurt people. so the question becomes, what should the level be? cost benefit analysis is a useful way of doing that. you balance the cost and the benefits. i'm persuaded that it's a useful technique. there are a number of people that critical of that and there's an ongoing debate. >> host: who gets to decide where the balance is?

>> guest: well, the way it works in the u.s. system is the regulatory agencies ultimately the person who is appointed by the president or even the president himself, and often the decisions are not based on cost benefit analysis, and often the cost benefit analysises are done battery and you think the decision is not driven by a scientific approach but by a political approach and these are all problems one has to address. >> host: next call from portland, oregon. >> guest: i have a few questions. the first one is regarding circumstantial evidence. it's becoming more and more prevalent, and sometimes less and less credible. and the second question is more along social norms. what effect do you think the people such as rush limbaugh and so forth have on the social norms of the day? thank you. >> guest: you know, i guess i

don't really understand the first question. it may be that, as i mentioned earlier, prosecutors often have a lot of discretion and often when you prosecute a person and you send him to jail for a long time, it can be based on circumstantial evidence rather than the person making an admission or some witness testifying that the person did something wrong. but sometimes circumstantial evidence is quite powerful and at it up to a jury to decide whether it's sufficiently powerful. i think juries probably do a reasonably good job at that. i don't have any particular knowledge about its effectiveness. i just didn't understand the second question about rush limbaugh. >> host: talking about social norms. >> guest: an opinion leader. >> host: and who sets social norms. >> guest: one of the interesting things about social norms as

compared to the law, there's no way to change them. you change the law by going to congress and saying, please change it, and maybe they will or won't. suppose there's a social norm that bothers you, like wearing a tie or gay marriage or the opposite, the social appropriateness in men places. how do you change that? you can't go to congress because congress is going did he ever -- defer to the norms rather than try to change. the but this is -- opinion leaders, celebrities, influential people, can sometimes get these norms to change, just by making persuasive arguments or just by being who they are. >> host: an e-mail. what are your thoughts on why so many judges -- and he says those appointed by democratic presidents -- have so little regard if any for the economic consequences of their decisions?

>> guest: i don't whether that's true. i think judges -- i don't think there's a big difference in republican appointed and democratic appointed judges, at least that in that respect. there have been studies to see the extent to which republican and democratic pointed judges vote different, and they found some differences, not huge differences. and it may be that republican judges are a little more skeptical of that regulation than democratic judges are. that's just a different world view. i think that people tend to be conservative, worry about regulations, because they tend to think the free market does pretty well and the government often makes mistakes, and liberals and democrats ten to have the opposite views. they're more skeptical about the free market and more in favor of some kind of government regulation. this is true about judges, and so it's reflected to some degree

in their decisionmaking. >> host: next call comes from illinois. you're on the air. >> guest: yes. my name is tom sheets and i live in the country, and i'm a farmer. also on the county board, so i got a lot of -- i know how government works quite a bit. i called in about the professor's -- i really think this is a great privilege for me to be able to talk to you. you said several things about scientist have a consensus about global warming and there's a lot of scientists that devil -- disagree, and i sit out here in the country, lived here 56 years, and last night i counted 60 jetstreams overhead. 60. and we're always told that all this stuff we're doing on the ground is causing the global warming, and i personally don't

believe in global warming theory because i have heard scientists say that maybe it's as simple as this -- and i've been watching this pretty close because i listen to a lot of weather services and stuff. and at the beginning of february we had an increase in sun spots, which makes more sense than anything. when the sun gets hotter, we get hotter. so -- then the scientists say it's the carbon dioxide in the air. anything under 30,000 feet gets washed out. anything over stays there. >> host: tom, are -- where are you going with this? >> guest: well, a jet uses 2,000-pounds of diesel from d.c. to california. that's more than i use on my farm. i am just trying to -- why, when

we go with experts that are telling us that global warming is having this effect -- we're getting down to the clean air act, which they want to get rid of dust. and when we combine our crops in the fall, we create a lot of dust. dust is cleaned out of the air by rain. we have all these brilliant people that have ideology agendas, and they want to control, just like you said we need to redistribute to make global warming to favor cheaper countries. why instead do we have -- >> host: i think we got the point. i think we got the point. professor posner? >> guest: i think the caller -- i understand the caller's view. local conditions are often very

complicated, and the government in washington doesn't always understand them and can enact regulations that don't make sense, don't make sense for a particular region, don't make sense for a particular area, where certain conditions are different from the way they are elsewhere. i think -- i'm going stick to what said before. my reading of what scientists have said is there's a scientific consensus. if it's wrong, that's -- but that's good in a way, but that would certainly be awkward. i think it's probably right. scientists have looked at sun spots. if you just -- there's these very simple graphs you look at and they show how much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. it's been increasing for a century, and you look at temperatures and there's a close correlation where there's not a correlation between sun spot activities and temperatures. that said, we need some kind of climate treaty, i think.

you want to design the treaty in a way that does not put unfair burdens on some people. maybe one of the things the call are is getting at was maybe as he sees it, the regulation put excessive burdens on farmers fad not enough on airlines. those are difficult political questions that have to be worked out. >> host: but as a farmer in illinois, i think he's feeling a bit like a victim of some esoteric thoughts. >> guest: yeah. well, it's not just farmer in illinois. i don't have a deep understanding of climate change. i have to take the word of experts, and everything i write about -- i write about the law, which i understand, but the policy judgments ultimately they have to come from people who are specialist, and the world is a complicated people.

people specialize, get ph.ds so they can understand small packets of it. policymakers don't have any choice but to rely on this expertise. this is troublesome in a democracy because ordinary people are ultimately supposed to make policy choices, and if they feel like their representatives are making policy choices on the basis of science they don't understand, that's a significant problem. i don't have any solutions for it. >> host: eric posner is our guest. we're here no chicago. we have a gentleman at the mic who would like to ask a question. >> i'm from a northern suburb of illinois. maybe shy ask for makeup or at least a computer enhancement. i wish my voice was better, more like norman royce who was the voice of god. or steve reeves, who was hercules. kevines pretty good, too. maybe if you count up instead of

down because the programs you put on or 10. i hope what i say is worth the time and the cameras dwell on in -- >> host: you're fine, sir go to your question. >> i want to give people a chance to write some books down. my question will be asked in the beginning. can democracy work if people aren't all intellectually. it's people who are prone -- an intellectual is someone who is given to study, reflex and speculation. think of how many people who don't know the religion or nationality of our presidents, that people got here 10 though years ago, that abortion is wrong even if a failure of birth control is done soon, and the martyrdom of dr. kevorkian about letting people die with dignity. maybe we should live each day as we would want people to live in

a better future. and so the caller's voices were not very clear. i don think it's jbl's full. if you saw in sci-fi news, they're got 100. maybe the economy will be good enough so we can afford 64,000-dollar speakers. dr. christopher hill talk about with -- he had a co-awe their, too. he wrote a book called physics for poets, and steinway ling dorf, they have speakers that cost 188,000-dollar and it includes a cd and an imply fire. >> richard, can we go back to your original question about democracy and intel electric tombs. >> host: gary. the books are sex, murder, and the meaning of life. these are optimistic. less than human, about how we dehumanize people. indians, blacks and jews, by

david livingstone smith, and two authors who wrote a book about out of character, which means our character may not be set in stone. three very important boxes of 823 page. >> host: gary, thank you. we're going leave trip. i apologize. there was a question there about the effect of democracy. >> didn't want to say anything inappropriate. thank you so much. >> guest: the question about the relationship between democracy and intellectuals. this has been a problem that people recognized over a century ago. so as the united states became more of a mass democratic intellectuals became worried that ordinary people would have, in effect, too much influence. ordinary people who are not particularly educated, didn't understand what was going on, and the worry among the elites and intellectuals, they would have too much influence on politicians and politicians would make bad decisions.

i don't think that's right. i think -- there is a lot of people are not very educated or informed, but i think most people vote under the basis of how the economy is doing, whether they feel secure, and they're not so interested in particular policy instruments that the government chooses. what they want to see are results. and that gives the government the freedom to rely on experts to a certain extent, to choose whatever the appropriate policymakers are in order to achieve goals that people broadly agree with. >> host: eric posner has written books on social norms and a couple books on international law. he's an e-mail that combines them both. raymond from rhode island. if a middle eastern sheikh with an eight-year-old bride checks into a manhattan hotel, can u.s. or new york authorities arrest him for being in violation of new york or u.s. law? so he's not marrying in the united states.

right? he is already married. i think once he is in the united states, the united states would not recognize his marriage as valid. so suppose, for example, that -- what it the eight-year-old runs away. i don't think the u.s. authorities would return the eight-year-old to him on the ground that under the law of the country in which he comes from, he has control over his child, his child wife. earned, if the eight-year-old doesn't run away and doesn't come to the attention of u.s. authorities, nothing is going to happen, which is more likely. or more likely still the eight-year-old would have not been brought to the united states in the first place. >> host: a few minutes left. next call from right here in chicago. hi, chicago. >> guest: hello. professor posner, it's really an honor to speak with you. could you please comment regarding the supreme court members citing constitutional

law from other countries? david curry, who is a former member of the university of chicago law school, is cited frequently by the supreme court. his position is that the united states constitution was the first major product of constitutional democracy, a movement of the 17th, 18th 18th and 19th centuries, as such, our constitution became and remains a model for the development of other constitutional democracies. and as such, we can learn from the other constitutional democracies who have already learned from us. >> guest: yeah. a similar question was asked before, and what i said was that i think it makes sense to -- for justices -- if they do this in an honest and a sincere way to look at what's doing on in other countries for the purpose of interpreting the u.s. constitution.

at least under certain circumstances. i think the general concern, which is a legitimate concern, is that if you give the justices this additional interpretive method that they might just use it as a screen for implementing their ideological preferences, and that's a real concern, which makes me a little nervous about this practice but i'm not really opposed to it. >> host: brian morris, e-mails in to you: professor possessor in, you taught me contracts as a first year law student when you were visiting at nyu. you were a favorite of the students in our section. i'm wondering how, if at all, you believe your work on social norms relates to hayak's view on the distinction between law and legislation. >> guest: it's nice to hear from a former student, and it's -- >> host: who liked yes. >> guest: yes. even more so. and it's a typically challenging question.

hayak is a famous thinker who is well known for -- as a critic of the regulatory state, and he believes the government, simplifying greatly, didn't have enough information to engage in the kind of regulation that liberals support. now, there is a connection between that view and my view of that social norms, and one of the points i made about social norms, which i made earlier, is that they govern people's behavior to an extent that is onunderestimated and the doesn't take it into account when it enacts regulation. you can have perverse outcomes. in that sense, hayak is right, but the government has to be cautious when it passes laws and

regulates because there's so much of social life it doesn't really understand. on the other hand i think hayak may have gone a little too far. there are certain problems that are relatively well-defined and certain ways of influencing behavior which seem to work. taxes, criminal punishment. in most circumstances. that the government is often justified in engaging in regulation. >> host: eric posner is our guest, and boston, you're on the air with him. hi. >> guest: hello. i'd like to ask a question about earlier when you were talking about israel's support for the par tied -- apartheid government, and you juxtaposed it to america supporting dictators in central america and that's because of the cold war. have you never read any of the scholarship about american companies exploiting third world countries and poor countries for

economic reason? you really think it matter of cold war? and why is america exploiting other countries for cheap labor. how can you say it's because of the cold war that companies exploit other people, mainly nonwhite people to make billions of profit while they're being paid 50 cents a day in these countries? >> host: thank you, boston. we got the point. >> guest: yes. well, i think you're taking my earlier answer out of context. i was trying to draw a comparison to -- from israel to the united states, and the u.s. had security reasons for propping up -- or at least not pressuring dictatorships in other countries. i don't -- i was making a pretty cautious point. i don't to whether the security reasons were justified. they were applause -- plausible

but there's an argument that the u.s. should have given them lest support. what you're saying is the u.s. was propping up dictatorships in order to support american companies that were exploiting people in these countries. exploitation occurs, but it's complicated because what you call exploitation could also just be called trade, and investment, and most countries, including democratic countries, which are poor, welcome trade and investment. why? because if american companies come and build factories, their jobs for people there, and if there's trade, then people in those countries can build things and in return get foreign currency they can use to buy things they need. it's true there's exploitation in the sense that those people are paid lower wages than americans doing similar jobs. that's while the trade and

investment occurs in the first place. if american companies or two pay them the same wages, the wouldn't invest in these countries. be no reason to. and so i think the people in those countries are being benefited through most forms of foreign investment and trade. there are cases where that doesn't happen, where the government is very corrupt and the government and the country in which investment is taking place is very corrupt. i think all in all, globalization, this type of globalization, where wallet 'er weltier countries benefit people in other countries quite a bit, and of course notably in china and -- really china is the best example, where 20-30 years ago, there were -- virtually the entire country was incredibly impoverished, and in the last 20 years, something like 200 -- 300 million people have gone from living on a dollar a day to

a respectable livelihood and that's mainly bus of trade and investment. >> if you were advising a google type company, multinational, when it comes to international law, u.s. law, chinese law, is this an area that is getting more and more fuzzy with all the multinational corporations? >> guest: it's become more difficult. and people -- you have companies that we identify -- an american company or german company, but they have shareholders all over the world and they ultimately control the company, and the company will set up oafses all over the world, and at some point it may be unclear what the nationality of that country is, and these companies can take advantage of laws in order to make profits. sometimes it's troublesome. sometimes it's less troublesome,

the companies are just doing business in a more efficient way. so, the lawyers for google, they face challenges. they have to deal with foreign law, international law to some extent, and it's a much more complex world than we lived in as recently as 20 or 30 years ago. >> eric posner is our guest, ohio, you're on the air with him. good afternoon. >> guest: hello. thanks for taking my call. yesterday on lip test and on book tv, we heard from laura caldwell, who wrote "a long way home," about a young man who left a gang instead of fight. he was not even there when a man was killed, but later he was picked up. he spent almost six months in the cook county holding area -- wasn't even convicted of anything. now, they say that only 5% of the people picked up fall into this category, but that's out of

the hundreds of thousands that have been arrested. i'm just wondering how this could happen in a democracy. >> guest: how could it indian a -- it happen in a democracy? i think ordinary people want to be protected by -- from crime but they don't want to pay high taxes, and so the elected representatives are squeezed between these two contradictory impulses, and the result is they may skimp on procedure protections or on training for police or court officials, with the result that we get this kind of outcome. >> host: this e-mail from tm in seattle. professor posner, can you comment on the philosophical basis for the roe v. wade decision. we now have situation in which every federal judicial appointment hinges to some

degree on the candidate's views on abortion. should this question have been left to state legislatures? >> guest: i think with the benefit of hindsight, it would have been a good thing to leave to state leg legislatures. it's had a bad effect on national politics. i believe in abortion rights, but maybe i'm not as passionate as other people are and these institutional questions are serious. it's a bad thing that appointments and nominations turn on the judge's view of abortion rights, or at least of the constitutionality of abortion right's, because the legal system is so much more complex and so much is going on that you wouldn't think that that single question should be driving what's going on. >> host: eric posner, this e-mail. in the spring of 2010, ny and harvard law schools had a

conference to school law firms being highly critical of law school's curriculum, for which rope the corps have reduced hiring. are these corporate law firms correct? and given the economic times what are the cost benefits of one entertaining the idea of law school? >> guest: law firms have always been -- have always complained about legal education. they think that we teach too much sort of theoretical stuff and we don't give enough practical experience to -- or don't teach enough practical skills to law students. the law schools know this and they have been trying hard over decades to introduce more christian -- clinical teaching and more practical teaching. it's very hard to teach that stuff. the only way to learn how to conduct deposition is to do it, where you're with a senior law

and you watch and you're allowed to ask questiones. that cannot be taught in law school. most of the law is based on practical experience, not book learning. that just the way things are. >> a few minutes left with our in-depth guest, eric posner. santa rosa, california. >> guest: my question is concerning international trademarks and internet domain names. i know you said you're not an expert in intellectual property, but organizations have a lot of control over who gets what domain names and do american citizens have recourse through our government to appeal a decision made by an organization like ican? >> guest: i don't know the answer to your question. ican is an interesting institution. at it not a formal legal institution but it's a body that has been set up by states to

assign domain names as the caller mentioned. i think it has internal appeal procedures, and i know there's been litigation about domain names. but i don't think american institutions or courts have the authority to reverse a decision by ican. >> host: just rev repsing back an earlier caller talking about the book, long way home, chris gray tweets in that the subject of the book was in cook county holding for six years, not six days as the caller mentioned. professor posner, this e-mail has come in for you as well. i wanted to get to. there we go. this is from -- not sure -- it's from sandy in colorado. how did we get so far away from the intent of the original constitution? this country is not a federal democracy. it is a democratic republic,

states have autonomous authority over the federal government. >> guest: that's the view that many people had 200 years ago. it's not clear that was really the founders' view, but let me answer the question this way. the founders had certain expectations about how the constitution would work, but they really had no idea. they were gambling -- there was veryings precedent -- basically no precedent, and they were hoping the government structures would work in certain ways. they were wrong. almost immediately a party system arose which they hadn't anticipated. the party system had a lot of influence over how government worked. almost immediately the executive became more powerful than many of them thought, and what happened is things changed. technology changes, people's views changes, and the risk is the constitution, if it's interpreted somehow according to

its original understanding, just won't catch up and it will be ignored, and so over the years, the courts have reinterpret it and it's meaning has definitely changed. now, some people like the way it's changed, some people don't like the way it's changed, but it seems pretty clear to me that the original understanding has not that much relevance to how our lives are organized today. >> host: so, eric posner, the semester has wrapped up for the university of chicago law school. what did you teach this past semester? >> guest: i taught banking law and a seminar on the federal reserve board. >> host: do you get to make up your own classes. >> guest: it's kind of a charged negotiation, and anything can go. >> host: what are you going to be teaching next semester? >> guest: i think i'll be teaching contract law. >> host: where do you fine time to write? do you write in your office, at home? >> guest: both. i write in my office and at

home. we don't teach over the summer so there's a lot of time to write then. >> host: what is your next book? >> guest: i have two books coming out. one is a become -- book on contract law for students, and another book is about international law and it's meant to be almost like a reference work, which brings together my ideas and other people's ideas how international law works and puts them in one useful place. >> host: if you were to recommend one of your books, which one would you recommend? >> guest: i think maybe the perils of global legalism. i think -- i consciously wrote that for people who were not experts. most of my other books are more for an academic audience. anybody who is reasonably informed can get something out of them. but the perils of global legalism is intended to a large extend for lay audience as well

as academic us audience, and addresses the role of international law in our life, the extent to which the bush administration should or should not have disregarded norms of international law to the extent they did. the influence of globalization on american government and policy. >> host: and we have shown you the cover of that book. let's look at some of the other books as we close here on in depth. in 2000, law and social norms. professor posner's first book. the perils of global legalism. the limit office international law, came out in 2005. no foundations of cost benefit analysis, 2006. terror in the balance. 2007. law and happiness. came out in -- this is a book that heed ited. >> climbed change, justice, and the executive, up bound, 2010.

professor eric posner, thank you for joining us here at the chicago tribune's printer's row litfest for our in depth program. >> guest: thank you. >> that's going to wrap up in depth for this month. next month, linda hogan, native american indian writer bill be our guest on july 3rd. we continue our live coverage here from chicago. there are three more panels we are covering. they will be live in just a few minutes in ten minutes or so. we will be live again. those panels coming up, at 3:00 p.m. eastern time, martin marty, the author of deitrick the book, letters and paper from prison. he will be speaking. ellis coast, well-known journalist author, the end of anger is his most recent book. he will be at 4:00 p.m. eastern time. and then finally, we will wrap up our coverage here from

chicago with robert mcclurery. author of, radical disciple, all coming up here on book tv. that's where we are. reminder. if you want to send us your summer reading list, send us a tweet. tell us what you're reading this summer we may be using it on the air this summer. and you can also send us an e-mail. tell it whattor reading, especially nonfiction books. thanks for being with us. >> one of the large displays here at book expo america 2011, this persius book, and one of them is public affairs, and the publisher is susan wineberg, who is going to tell us about the new books coming out by public affairs and the future books. where should we start?

>> it's always so great to see you at book expo, and we can start with a become -- a book that is coming out called the building open societies. this is a book about george's work. he has given away billion and billions of dollars through this open society foundation, based on his principles and putting his philosophy to work in the real world. it covers his programs from around the world and includes an essay from george called, my philanthropy. >> now right next to that is poor economics. >> it's one of the most exciting big idea books we have had in a while. the authors are the founders of the m.i.t. poverty lab, and they have really pioneered the idea of, let's do some on the ground

work, experiments, observations, to learn what really works in development. where we should put our effort. where we should put our money. and they are award-winning, acclaimed economists whose work is really getting a lot of attention and really being embraced now. when i read the proposal, fit, this is the most important work on poverty i have read since we published microfinances and social business, and we felt we had to have this become, too. >> susan wineberg, does that book include the concept of microlening? >> well, the microfinances, banker to the poor, has something about microfinances and microlending and research on the ground, but it has lots of other techniques, too. it looks at how poor people really live, and what they will choose to spend their money on when they have money. how they make decisions, and then does -- almost like

controlled experiments to see what will help in the long run. for example, what's the best way to distribute bed nets to protect against malaria, or asking questions for people who seem to be not having enough money for food, why did they boy a tv instead of more nutritious food. so you can help understand that and affect decisions they might make about their lives. >> i want to ask you.the cover of the book with the knot in the corner. >> the idea there is untying the knot of poverty in the developing world, and it seemed kind of a good motif. really we felt the words on the cover were so strong we didn't want any kind of illustration to get in the way of it. a very powerful statement this book makes. >> unnatural selection. you were very excited about this book. >> unnatural selection is one of those pro0 pose sals -- when i read it, this is what we're here to do. we're their do these kinds of books. and the author is -- i call her a scholarly journalist, and she

has work as places like the chronicle for higher education, based in shanghai. going back to beijing to be the editor of science magazine there a lot of us say one child policy in china, you know, why so many more boys than girls in champion and india and other places, and we say, huh, that's funny. what's going to happen there? then we move on to another question. well, mara didn't move on. she said, what does it mean there's so many missing girls? how did this happen? what's going to happen when these boys grow up and there's no one to marry. what will society be like? she has asked those questions about the society and what's going to happen because of that, but she also went back and researched how did this happen, and some of it is what we think we know about things like one child policy, but some of it has to do with zero population growth and an enthusiasm for population control that has had

great unintended consequences. i think will surprise people. >> that book is, unnatural selection. right next to that, two books about some troubled nations. >> yes. dancing in the glory of monsters is about the congo. our editorial director got this book in from actually a friend of jason's -- the wonderful journalist who has written about africa, and she knew our editorial director, and she said there's nobody who knows as much about the congo than jason stearnss. so clyde read it and he said there's a real book and they're week to fine it and they worked together to hone it. clyde reside claim is you can understand anything in the newspaper about the congress -- congo if you haven't read this

book. and the newspaper is a tiny piece of what is happening there. the reviews have borne this out. i could go on some on. but the reviews of this book have been just an amazing response, and you're really seeing people not backing away but saying, i want know about this story. i want to hear more about the congo. >> dr. paul paper. >> paul farmer is -- as everyone knows, partners in health, and has worked so hard to develop health care in places like haiti, has a very interesting medical school kind of organization, and practicing medicine on the ground in places like haiti and like rue rwanda, and he had -- the effect of the earthquake in haiti and the work they have done and the level they got to know haiti, he just said, i want to write about what

has happened, what is happening, is the response adequate, is the response from world leaders what should it should be? is the aid being used in the way it should be. he takes the opportunity to get haitian voices involve in this issue. he talks about how -- he gets different people involved in haiti that he has known often for many years, to write about this, too. so paul is not only talk about the experience in haiti but he has also been able to give voice to people in haiti who in all the brouhaha and publicity have not been heard from. >> susan wineberg, the photo on the cover of this is rather powerful. >> it really is. we were looking for something that would convey the mix of emotions you get when you think.haiti and the earthquake and you think about the recovery and it is such a mixture of hope

and maybe despair, of grand plans and understanding everybody is so vulnerable. >> susan wineberg, publisher of public affairs books, and i want to talk about this book, the other barack. >> the book is coming out in july of this year, and this is a book, as the subtitle couldn't say better this bold and reckless life of president obama's father. sally jacob is a correspondent at the boston globe, and she did a profile of obama and kenya, but not really deep enough, and she said if he is elected. i'm going to pursue this story. she has been to kenya many times. she has talked to everyone that knew barack obama senior, and

she has put together his life story in a way that is riveting, arresting, revealing, and i say i can't really know this but i think if president obama read this book, he would learn things about his father he doesn't know. i think it's an amazing contribution to our knowledge of the president and his family. >> what's it like editing a journalist? >> well, it's an interesting process. journalist on the one hand can write very fluidly, and they're used to the idea of changes and rewrites. so, they're not kind of hugging their precious prose, but sometimes the arc of a book verse of the arc of a series of feature stories can be very different, and i think our editors find that's the think they work on, the arc.

the arc of this book is on barack obama, sr., his childhood in kenya, his time in the u.s. which includes time at the university hawaii and hard sadr. and then how the immigration service decided you're a lot of trouble and maybe you should leave, and what happens when he goes back to kenya. >> very quickly, peter thompson. >> peter thompson, the wars of afghanistan, is an epic book, and that is because peter thompson's knowledge of afghanistan goes very far back. he was very involved both through the soviet period, in between the american involvement. he has had roles in afghanistan, on the diplomatic level. he speaks russian and pashtun. a gift for languages. so he was able to read sometimes documents in their only language that not many people are able to master, including some archived from the soviet period that no

one had used before in their research or in their work, and he brings a passion and a level of both detail and scope to this story that we think is unique, and it was -- it's quite an effort getting a book like this together, but absolutely worthwhile and we're thrilled that it's going to the reading public in july. >> two becomes out or coming out, deal from hell and inside "the new york times." >> the deal from hell is a story about the chicago tribune and what has happened to media businesses from an insider. jim o'shay was a long-time reporter at the chicago tribune, became the managing editor of the l.a. times so he has the experience of being a reporter and then in the decisionmaking meeting and it's t