>> absolutely. freida, thank you for inviting me. people were surprised. but thank you any way. and there is definitely a connection. and i think also the center for american progress talked about our work on criminal justice reform work. and we have been for many, many years. first off, it's core to charles

koch's belief in a free and prosperous society. and going back to some of the last panel which i thought was excellent as well talking about removing obstacles for opportunity talking about disadvantaged, the poor. if you want to help the poor, as we do, i think probably everybody in this room does, everybody on this panel does. there's no better way than to reform our criminal justice system because they are the most adversely impacted by that system that is so broken. so that's one part of it. the other part is we had some negative experiences ourselves with the criminal justice system. back in the mid-90s. that we learned from. and we wanted to see whatever we learned and how the process went for us. if it's happening to a big company with a lot of resources like us what's happening to the small business owners what's happening to the average citizen, what's happened to the average joe in the street out there, and so that got us involved working with the nacdl, national association of criminal defense lawyers and others, and then personally from me, i'm from worcester, massachusetts. and i worked in a jail when i was in college.

i worked in a jail. i wasn't in jail. i worked in a jail. let's be clear on that. but when i worked there it was the best job i had until i went to law school by the way. tells you about some of the jobs i had. but i saw many kids i went to school with who weren't the best students, who were poor, who made mistakes and then ended up in the cycle and criminal justice because they were drug addicts, some mentally ill. that left an impression on me. so for us at koch it's all these things plus get back to why we're all here, the bill of rights, the constitution, the first ten amendments, all of them. at least four of them deal with criminal justice issues. and they deal with between the fourth amendment, the fifth amendment, the sixth amendment and the eighth amendment. and then also the first amendment because if you don't have the first amendment, the other nine don't matter. it's all about free speech. and it's all about our natural rights. it's all these rights. our founding fathers may not have got it perfect, but they knew the greatest encroachment to individual liberty and

freedom would come from the criminal justice system. and they were right. that's why we're very proud and happy to partner with anthony ramiro in aclu, center for american progress freedom works, you name it across the board. we'll work with anyone and anybody on these issues. >> beautiful. you have drawn a connection between the first and fourth amendments in a way i hadn't thought of but then you send us back to history. you can't have the criminal justice system without. and the framers are clear about free speech. mike lee when he came this was incredible, check it out on youtube, talked about the main case that enflamed the framers was the case of john wilkes who criticized the king. he wrote pam presented to criticize the king. the king writes a general warrant that doesn't specify the place to be searched or seized, identified wilkes as the author of this anonymous father and charges him with libel.

the greater the truth, the worse the offense. a jury acquits him and george camden writes paper search of private diaries o offenses both of rights of searches and seizures and freedom of thought and political dissent. i had not made that connection. you've now laid the table for what i'm going to ask you, greg lukianoff. focus more on speech off campus and we've had a great debate here, one of my -- >> tremendously fun. >> tremendous debate about the european and american conceptions of free speech. and i want to set those up in a s.e.c. but take a beat on what mark said about the connection between the criminal justice amendments, the fourth amendment and the first amendment and to what degree that might inform fires work to stand up for free speech on campus. >> sure. so i'm the president of fire. and we also defend due process. and i had someone who honestly i think should have known better. a professor at yale saying why are these things even connected, twie do you do these two

completely unrelated things? and it was a bizarre idea to me. if you get to the fundamental liberal idea, kind of what jonathan roush talks about when he talks about liberal science, it's about you have limitation, you have biases, you're not omniscient. we need restricting people from censoring recognizes. it's a great sense to my one fancy term i like to use ep stemmic humility. it makes all of the difference. i'm afraid universities are failing to teach that wonderful and important habit. >> bill mar smal, you teach at the university you teach and i -- >> i teach too. >> you teach too. you're not forced to go to faculty meetings however.

talk about overincarcerations. bill, the hate speech debate is hot right now and liberals are on both sides as we begin to tease in the last panel some traditional civil libertarians think there are due process violations in banning on popular commencement speeches and speakers, more sympathetic to the dignitary rights to use a phrase arthur brooks talked about. of offended minorities and vulnerable speakers. which side do you come down on? >> i come down more on the freedom of expression side, but i don't do so easily. i think if you walk into a classroom and there's a student and being subject to all kinds of ridicule because of who you are or you're being made fun of for who you are, it's hard to participate in that academic climate in the same way you would if you were a part of the privilege class that comes in with all the power on your side. so i think a lot of these efforts are really to sort of equalize the learning environment.

protect people from hostile environments which is a very legitimate goal, one that should be followed because we need to think about the fact that the classroom doesn't effect everybody the same. the workplace doesn't effect everybody the same. when we see attacks on people's dignity that go on, to use that language from the former panel, it weakens the educational structure. it weakens the work structure. and that's why there are protections against it. >> brad, this word dignity has come up. and there is a great clash between european and american notions of free speech on the one hand and dignity on the other. and the debate is surfacing around incredible fight over what the europeans call the right to be forgotten. and this comes from the french, right of oblivion, which is very french, sort of right out of "star trek." the french want to be for goaten and the americans want to be

remember. if you're in europe -- if i'm in europe and one of you is tweeting right now during the panel that i'm doing a boring job moderating this panel, i could object that this violated my dignitary rights and google and yahoo would have to decide if i'm a public figure or not. if they decide i'm not or if the tweet is not in the public interest, they have to remove it. if they guess wrong they're liable up to like 2% of their annual income. which is i think $50 billion in google's case last year so we're talking serious money in the case of google. describe -- well, i think i want to ask you this, who's right, the americans or the europeans? [ laughter ] >> well, i wouldn't want to betray my country on national television here. i think there are differing approaches to privacy and some of these issues. and, you know, i think one thing that americans are sometimes forgetting actually of late is that hard fought right to privacy. so i don't know who's better but i think there's a balance that needs to be struck and i think

we may be going in a direction that's further than we would like to go. i see in the area where i work most often which is campaign finance, it's interesting -- i believe in france. i don't want to be quoted on that, but i believe there's some european countries where they say we need to know who's financing all these ads. there they say, no, you can't disclose who's financing all these ads. it's the exact opposite in order to protect the privacy of those engaged in political speech to preserve certain social interactions as well. you know, if we're going to demand to judge everybody on their politics, i think society becomes a very unpleasant place to live. so i think there's much to be said for sort of keeping a greater wall of privacy around what people do. and say at any one time. i'm not sure if that answers your question, but my thinking is that whichever way is the best or maybe the europeans have gone too far, i think we may be at a point now where we've gone overboard in a sort of, you

know, everybody's got to know everything about everyone. i'm into the sure -- i'm not sure that is healthy either. >> i want to focus on that in a moment. but first maybe a response. do you want to defend a little bit of american free speech imperialism? >> absolutely. but i also want to say something about the academy. because there is this idea that all of this censorship that takes place on campus, at least it's done with good intentions. there are very few times when human beings act with a single intention ever. and they're very rarely completely commendable or completely pure. i get the argument, well, campuses are trying to make places more welcoming, more inclusive. okay. we're about to file our tenth lawsuit in a free speech litigation campaign and we're not a litigation organization. and we have dealt with case after case where administrators have told students that they can't, for example, hand out copies of the constitution in order to honor constitution day without getting two weeks advance notice from a state

administrator. we had a case in california, a school controlled by the first amendment, was told not only did he have to restrict his protest to a tiny free speech zone that he had to apply for in advance to use, he had to wear a tiny free speech badge in order to use it. i understand the argument that are good intentions, but sometimes we just can't blindly trust in the good intentions of power. >> bill. >> well, i have to agree we can't always trust the good intentions of power. on my campus one of my faculty members has written a number of critical editorials against the governor of our state and they're trying to take away his center and do whatever they can against him. and that's another example. >> that's the mike nichols case. >> that is another example. i don't think we can say one side or another has a monopoly. the idea of freedom of speech we believe in it strongly until it breaks down.

then it is free speech for me and not for thee. when we really need to be able to apply it across the board. but where i have to disagree with you is where i do not think college campuses are anything close to bastiens ofsen sorship. are people cannot say what they want to say. at the classes i have in north carolina and my colleagues have and elsewhere, there are open forums and people say all kinds of things. differences of opinion are extraordinarily welcome. there may be a few instances but i don't think they give any sort of sense of climate on american educational campuses. >> mark, is it your experience that american campuses are incredible hospitable to american diversity? diversity of opinion? >> no. well, may that be an understatement. working at koch there's a campaign going on run by student groups, so to speak. i'm a bit cynical on it i must admit.

but it's called unkoch my campus. because charles koch institute and foundation are working with some educational institutions across the country as they have for many, many years funding free market courses and things on prosperous society, free and prosperous society class call liberal type. and it's led to a lot of foia requests and professors teaching free economics. they want private mails and they want to know this and that. i'm talk about free speech, i'm pretty much free speech absolutist in a lot of ways because i think they are natural rights and really the government can't restrain them because they didn't give them to us. they're certain unalienable rights we've been hearing about from the declaration of independence. i'm fine with the student groups financed by many organizations that oppose koch politically and that's their right to do it. amen. i support it. it's first amendment.

but it's hypocritical when some of these student groups say when we're doing it it's not just because of koch, we want to point out other big interest business on campus. and there's a lot of groups on the left, a lot of wealthy people on the left that have business that are funding university projects and programs. i don't want them to get attacked at all, but it doesn't seem anything but us is happening. i think it's wrong to attack either side quite frankly. i don't think there's a lot of tolerance at least what i've seen the past few years. >> brad. >> if i could chime in briefly. i would be i guess more skeptical than bill. i think there are things students know they can't say on campus and they do not say. as a conservative libertarian in a law school setting where in some cases almost never hold those sorts of views i've become used to over the years to a certain ritual that occurs midway through the first semester. there will be a group of students and they'll appear in my office, four, five, three students, something like that.

and they'll come in and it's not quite clear what they want. they kind of talk about class a little bit. and they kind of do this, but they don't have any seeming objective. and then finally somebody will say something like what did you think about, you know, x, y or z or whatever. and i say it's a load of hogwash and you can see them go we thought there was somebody we could talk to, we thought there was somebody on our side. and it starts pouring out the way they feel stifled in class that certain opinions are in fact not allowed to be authored and that they'll be ridiculed by professors and targeted by professors. i think it goes into more broadly why i think most people and most professors on campus are very good and do welcome diversity of opinion. a few people can really spoil that atmosphere. and i think in too many cases we've given heck lers veto to many places. i think in most places where commencement speakers are run off campus, my guess is most students would have been perfectly happy to hear them.

rather a relatively small group allowed to issue a heckler's veto and i think sometimes we need braver administrators, braver faculty who will stand up and say no this is a university and you can be exposed to different ideas that you don't agree with, even ones from the kochs. >> i want to interject the data in here. american university college has asked 9,000 professionals, including professors. they're asked this question, is it safe to hold unpopular points of view on campus? that is an incredibly soft question. is it merely safe to hold unpopular points of view on this campus? and only 16.7% of university professors strongly agreed with this statement. jonathan heit and phillip -- talk about how social sigh kol ji asking them to raise their hands about how many are conservative. there's about 1,000 people in the room, only three of them

raise their hand. that's a ratio of about 267 to 1 when you subtract the other people who rose their hands. what he realize ds statistically speaking there are certainly more than just three in this room. but the fact that they're afraid to raise their hand speaks volumes. >> bill, what can explain this? you and i we teach in law schools. and i think those stats seem vaguely right in terms of the fact that conservatives seem to be a minority on faculties. why is that? >> i could make an easy cut here, but i'm not going to on the basis of why. but i think part of the answer is people coming into academic s is do so with a certain sense of idealism that leads to left of center kind of positions. but just because people might be left of center on particular issues doesn't mean they're intolerant and don't want to hear other ideas. i think most teachers, the ones i work with, are aware the best

way to have real conversations in the classroom are to have conversations with the types that we're having here in which somebody might be outnumbered three-to-one, but that's okay. you want to stand up for your position, you stand up for your position. and that's a good thing. and you actually learn. i went to a very conservative law school at a very conservative time. i certainly got a lot of grief from certain faculty members on the positions i took. and i think it made me stronger in my ability to be able to articulate my views. >> nicely said. all right, speaking of three-to-one, the question anonymous speech has been flagged and we have to talk about campaign finance issues, which cut in unexpected ways. anonymous speech, brad smith, raised it the framers were obviously centrally concerned about the main thing they wanted john wilkes to be able to have was the ability to write an anonymous pamphlet. the number was number 45. as mike lee said that number 45 was so galvanizing to the

framers that they held parties where people would eat 45 ham sandwiches and drink 45 steins of beer and write 45 on the sides of their taverns. so this was an experience for them. let's see, mark, anonymous campaign speech. why is it important to be able to give anonymously to political campaigns? >> well, i think it's important because it's consistent with the bill of rights and the constitution what you were just talking about. i think my point of view is that people should be able to give must be anonymously or on the record. it should be up to them to decide and not for the government to decide. the government remember the bill of rights, i'm going to paraphrase the late great justice william brennan here which i'm sure he'll be very flattered by. but basically the bill of rights, the framers didn't lay out what our rights were. they made sure that government couldn't infringe upon those rights because they were presumed to be pre-existing. my point of view is that to the extent people want to

disclose -- and there are a lot of disclosure laws that are compelled disclosure. trust me, bill and i were talking before we got on here, if charles koch and david koch pretty much credited or blamed for every single penny that's spent on a conservative or libertarian cause or issue or candidate. so fl is no dark money as with regard to the kochs in my opinion. but reality is there's a cost to disclosure. and from a cost benefit analysis in my opinion i don't quite see who really pays attention to this other than activists on each side that want to harass, intimidate, create lists,

people to put together lists and try to intimidate. i don't think it really brings about a lot of full and fair discussion in our country anymore. >> i'll ask you this question and then ask it of greg. might there be a difference for disclosure for individuals like kochs or advocacy individuals, like the naacp which should be able to have anonymous membership lists and exxon, could that be different for campaigns you want corporations to disclose but not individuals? >> you're asking me? >> yeah. >> look, i don't -- i think that there's a lot of disclosure for campaigns it's compelled if it's a super pack and that type of thing. the naacp versus alabama case. there's another one involving the socialists party from several years ago.

yeah, i'm not saying that poor exxon's going to be retaliated against. they don't have to disclose things. all i'm saying is i don't know where the right line is, what the divide is. what i'm saying is who is really benefitting from disclosure and why are we doing it at this point in time? from my perspective and i admittedly am inside a bubble working at koch and seeing it the last five years, i don't see it driving productive behavior. in fact, it's led to death threats and things like i said that is not positive behavior. >> brad. is there any condition under which disclosure in campaigns is appropriate. >> well, i think this is an important point, it's not a question of all disclosure or no disclosure. if you ask me i tend to feel like the government should not force people to disclose facts about themselves without some really powerful reason to do so. and generally my sort of preferred i dealistic is no disclosure. people have the right to be private and others can evaluate that. but i'm willing to make compromises.

in the real world people disagree. unless we're going to beat each other's throats all the time we need to find accommodation. there's lots of lines that can be drawn. for example we talk now the word is dark money, like nobody knows where it's coming from. actually, there's no political ads in the united states that are dark money. they all require it to say somebody paid for it. so what people are really saying when they say we don't know who paid for this, what they really mean is we don't know as much about who paid for it as we want. it just says it's paid for by the naacp or by the u.s. chamber of commerce. we want to know who in particular that is. and for example groups of more, you know, names that don't stand up for anything, again, americans for better things. >> that's what the national constitution says. >> yeah. but you can usually find out enough about the group. one of the things that cracks me up to give one example is i remember after 2010 when they first started raising this about dark money, and i can't tell you how many news stories i said read crossroads gps, a shadowy

dark money group founded by former rnc chairman ed gillespie and karl rove to elect candidates to congress. i'm like if this is a shadowy dark money group, you just told us what's going on so they're not doing a good job. there are a lot of different options too. one proposal i've seen more and more, it's not really taken off in getting passed and enacted into law but people are pushing it, is that somebody from the organization has to appear on screen. and it usually says exactly who that has to be, the chairman of the organization has to appear on screen and say just like the candidates have to i'm brad smith and i approve this message. is that always a good thing either? that's a different type of disclosure. that person may be particularly homely. people don't like homely people in politics. that's the reality. they react better to good looking people. it may be a persons of a race. maybe the person is arabic and in certain parts of the country a lot of people might find they don't like that, right? so there are lots of things like that i think we need to be

and thinking about. we've gotten into the argument of prodisclosu)e or antidisclosure rather than thinking there are lots of different types of disclosure, everyone a person like me who could be said to be anti-disclosure. is willing to live with a lot of disclosure. i think there are reasons why people want it that are not entirely frivolous but i think we're not doing any cost balancing or recognizing you can draw different lines. >> bill, youf been wonderfully restrained. what do you think about disclosure. >> when you see this ad paid for by mothers for apple pie it doesn't tell you much. but you have to put this in a larger context. i'm glad everybody here is interested in helping the poor. but the poor have very little political influence because they don't give money. and it's very helpful to voters to know who it is they're supporting. and one of the cues on that is who contributes to a particular campaign. the fact is that the presidency really doesn't make that much

difference, but large amounts of money can be put into lowball lot races by groups nobody knows who they are and at the last minute they sway elections because the other side doesn't have enough money to be able to defend against the attack. so disclosure is really a second best kind of regulation to at least give a little bit of cue so the voters can have some idea why it is that somebody is attacking another candidate or not. >> we have to now put on the table the question of citizens united. we are having a great debate about whether citizens united was rightly or wrongly decided, co-hosted by the federalist society and the constitution society in boston on may 12th. we had a great debate on a similar topic with intelligence squared here in philadelphia. and it's strange bedfellows. so it was floyd abrams and nadine arguing in favor of the position that corporations have the same first amendment rights as natural persons.

and zephyr and beth newborn arguing against it. this is an area where sometimes many sometimes convergence on the pro-corporate speech position. brad, you really are the world expert on citizens united. you've seen how it's been extended in hobby lobby. you've heard some of the debate today about the way its corporate speech and religion rights are going further. still, did citizens united go too far or not far enough or just right? >> i don't think it went too far. take it on its own terms. it's a narrow decision on a particular set of facts. remember, the position of the u.s. government was it could ban a documentary movie about a major political candidate during an election year simply because like every movie you have ever seen in a theater, rented from amazon or any place else, right, it had corporate involvement in its production and distribution. all right.

that idea strikes me as just absurd. if you want to talk about the radicals on the supreme court, i would say it's the four members of the court who said that's okay the government can ban a movie like that, a documentary movie about a political candidate because a corporation helped produce it or something like that. if you take it on a broader sense, i also think it's right. i mean, corporations do not -- the court doesn't believe the corporations are people in a natural sense, but it's long recognized that corporations have rights because the people who form them have rights. if we were to go back to the thing about the fourth, fifth and sixth amendments and so on, for example you couldn't just -- the government couldn't just go in and seize corporate assets and leave the shareholders with worthless certificates. say well it's a corporation. they don't have any rights. it's the same thing i think with corporate speech. i think corporate speech is often very good for an election. let's say you've got a company and it's out there in some small town in iowa or something like that and it wants to say to the people, look, if our governor

doesn't take this stimulus money, because he's off on some conservative right wing principled thing, right? he's like if we don't take this stimulus money, this company's going under. and you should know that. i think that's a good thing for the electorate to know. ipg they ought to know that. and i think they ought to hear that from the corporation, not from the ceo of the company or from some individual. so i think both particular facts and in the broader sense citizen united is probably correct. >> bill, the argument on the other side? you're not a traditional floyd abrams civil libertarian but you draw distinction between what the states and federal government can do. tell us about that. >> i think one of the interesting things that's happened under the name of campaign finance case law is that the states haven't been allowed to experiment. montana had a really interesting law in place. it was there because of the fact that the copper barrens took over the government back in the early 20th century, late 19th century. and they had special laws trying to deal with that corruption

that took place. and the supreme court struck that down under citizens united without giving the states any ability to sort of experiment to see what might work and what might not work. i mean, part of the issue on corporate speech, and i think there are reasons why you might want to protect it because speech is speech and we like to hear speech come into the marketplace. but you also have to remember it's subsidized speech. the only reason why it exists is because the state has allowed the corporation to come together and get all kinds of protections, which allows it to amass the kind of wealth that it can then use to try to influence the political process. and this theory i just gave you, by the way, on corporate power, comes from no other radical than justice william rhenquist who took that position and why he did not want to protect corporate speech. in the belloty case. >> mark, did citizens united make a difference in the way that you're able to give to campaigns? >> citizens united as brad

pointed out dealt with independent expenditures and we do very little of that. so no. but, i mean, to me personally i don't think that the government should be saying who can speak and who can't. even in a political season there's a lot of disclosure that goes with that. i think that, you know, from our perspective the more voices that are out there the better. and, you know, this whole notion that people are going to be persuaded by an ad or this or that, look, i live in wichita, kansas. i grew up in worcester, mass which are two kind of normal places which are not like d.c. or new york, no offense to people from d.c. and new york. >> that's the entire audience. >> sorry. that's me winning friends everywhere. [ laughter ] i think most people make up decisions based on, you know, factors peculiar and personal to them, whether they're swayed or not by ads, i don't know. i know in kansas we had the

first competitive governor and senator race in the 20 years that i've lived there. and i couldn't watch any of the ads by the end. i think the people aren't as swayed by it. i think that, you know, the whole idea that someone's going to change their mind about an issue they feel strong about just because someone runs an ad or that type of thing, i think that's overplayed. so the citizens united case to me i'm more of where brad is on it. i think it's fine. i think both sides spend a lot of money on ads. and last cycle the republicans won. the cycle before that the democrats won. and vice versa. i don't know how much of an impact it has. >> bill, one last thought. >> i just want to know why so many corporations are giving money for ads then if it's not working. there are a lot of shareholder lawsuits that should be brought against them. >> well, i think they're giving it so their voice can be heard in the marketplace of ideas. and i think, i said, both sides do it. whether they're effective or not, who knows. i think the people run on their records and these candidates are

elected in 2014 and flipped the senate. they'll be up in six years and there will be a whole new slate of ads. i think people vote on issues peculiar to them. both run ads and that's how it is for whatever reason. >> there is pretty good data that higher spending on ads does inform the public. a lot of people say they're worthless and you don't learn anything, but the votes by and large on fairly good information there's repetition, the hallmark of learning, right? say the same thing over and over, repeat yourself, redundant, y'all will remember that tonight, right? that's how you get through. and it does help voters to locate candidates on the political spectrum, identify them with issues. so i think in a sense both mark and bill are right. the ads are not going to change the minds of people who have strong perceptions on things and they probably won't change things generally but may inform them where a candidate is and that's a good thing. >> so one last set of questions and then closing statements. our job according to freida and we're going to do our homework

is to -- we've talked about what the left and right disagree about. i want to hone in on what the left and right agree about in free speech. as in the fourth amendment area, we have a series of nearly unanimous opinions that have been uniting justices very different perspectives. but they involve rather jarring facts. eight out of nine justices protected the right of people to film violent crush videos. similarly lopsided majority struck down california's desire to regulate violent video games. a similar majority said that very hurtful protests at funerals, military funerals, saying terrible things about gays and lesbians were okay. is the entire panel celebratory? obviously not of the results in these cases, does anyone think the supreme court has gone too far? and i'll just start with you, mark.

>> no. obviously hate speech no one's a fan of that that's reasonable or rationale. when you frame it that way and you look at how big the first amendment has been seen and the types of things it allows for between nazi marches through illinois, flag burning, animal abuse videos, that type of thing, i think while that's repugnant, and no honest decent person would be in favor of that, it is protected by the first amendment. which kind of underscores, not to bring up citizens united again, everybody gets so exercised over that and in some ways they're saying that maybe flag burning is more appropriate than running ads. but i think that they got it right. i think that the first amendment is big and broad. and it's an important part. as i started talking about all our rights are hinged on that and that's why it's number one, the first amendment. and everything else including all the ones dealing with criminal justice reform issues and criminal right -- criminal justice issues all flow from that.

>> one footnote, this is a plug for our bill of rights, but go look at the original copy of the bill of rights. our first amendment was not there first, it was third. the original first amendment said there has to be one representative in congress for every 50,000 inhabitants. if it passed there would be 20,000 people in congress today. so it's sort of a coincidence that our first is first but it's undoubtedly most important from the framers natural rights philosophy which we talked a lot about. greg, i presume you think justice alito is wrong. >> i do. one of my former summer interns was clerking for alito at the time he wrote that opinion and we're like how could you. but when it comes to offensive speech, i think that we're thinking about it wrong. and i think we're at a major sort of point of divergence between what the law says and what the cultural attitudes are

becoming. i think the law -- the first amendment ability to protect offensive speech, which i think is essential to protecting speech at all, is alive and well and thriving in supreme court law. law. i think culturally though our understanding of free speech has diminished a great deal. the idea of hearing people out, the idea of giving benefit of the doubt, the idea of not forming twitter mobs about anybody who makes a misstatement, so i wrote this book about freedom from speech that came out this past fall because i'm concerned about we need to go beyond explaining that -- i end up hearing even first amendment lawyers make this argument that essentially sounds like the first amendment is good because the first amendment protects it. you know, and it's like, no, we can't have that. and i think the most important thing we missed because we've gotten into normative judgments into whether or not speech is high value or low value, but what we seem to be consistently missing is there a real value to

know what people think not even if, but especially if it's horrible. this is a brave and very scientific method kind of way of looking at the world. but it's being currently by people who will make references to dignity and that kind of stuff being ignored. it's not about what we're saying what fred phelps is saying is good, it's just valuable to know what fred phelps thinks. >> bill, stand up for justice alito or for who argued for dignity in these cases and said the feelings of the family at the funeral should be respected. >> sorry, can't go there. i do think that one of the things that brings the left and right together is a celebration of the first amendment. and the idea that we can be offended. now, when it turns out when we get offended then we want to shut down the speech. but at least in the abstract we all think that this is our first freedom, even though it is the third, as you point out.

and i do think that allows reprehensible speech as well as the kind that we like. >> great. brad, do you want to make it unanimous on this question? >> pretty much. i mean, i'm very sympathetic with justice alito and other occasional dissenters in those opinions. those cases in a way don't interest me that much because they are rare and they are at the extreme. i think as mark and greg sort of hinted, the typical argument is we need to protect that. we need to protect pornography, we need to protect this kind of hateful speech, in order to preserve the core of the first amendment. and what strikes me as odd is that the core of the first amendment is where the court seems to be giving the least protection, and that is people talking about politics. and that just seems to me to be downright backwards that you get more protection if you want to have one of these foul demonstrations at the funeral of a servicemen then if you want to say as mark says my opponent runs ads that is a jerk and want to raise taxes. so that discourages me. what comes out is that actually there is very strong agreement,

i think, among us and i think as representatives of sort of different points of view on robust first amendment issues you point out most of these decisions were lopsided majorities. and there's a couple issues, campaign finance, maybe to some extent hate speech and so on that are divisive, but for the most part i get comfort most americans are pretty good on the question of freedom of speech. >> beautiful. there was a fine bit of agreement there and now it is time for closing statements. in the spirit of our think tank panel, i'll ask each of you crisply to identify the aspect of freedom of speech you think most important facing the country, and what will you and your organizations do to promote it over the next year and we're going to go in reverse order. brad. >> i think that the core issue is the issue of political speech which i think has been under attack for a long time and i think it is under attack. and both sides do it. whoever is losing or winning, i guess you could look at it, tries to attack and shut them

off from speech. and in the 50s, teachers were being asked to report if they -- what books they read, right, and things like that. and now it seems like the challenges come from the left you want to attack political speech, force people to disclose themselves so they can be subject to ridicule and so on. i think that is a major problem. we have to get over the idea that the first amendment is this kind of bizarre libertarian barrier to badly needed campaign reform. i think it is what the first -- what the founders thought was the way you assured government was clean, that government corruption was exposed, and that elections were fair and open. and at the center for competitive politics we fight on that through litigation and through trying to educate people about the way money actually works in politics and to get people thinking about what the alternative really would be if we gave government a blank check to regulate speech. >> great. bill? >> i got to agree with brad that it is political speech but i think it is a much more complex issue than he does. because one of the questions

about freedom of speech is it a value in and of itself or is it there because it is designed to promote democratic decision-making? and depending how you view on that, you might come out to different kinds of results on some of these campaign finance cases. there is something the matter with the system when the first thing you ask about a candidate is how much money can she raise? and a system in which somebody has to sit in a room for 20 hours a day dialing for dollars in order to be able to be competitive or a system in which poor people do not really have any access to the decisions being made. that's troublesome. it is troublesome for government to do any regulation. you have a deep -- a deep conflict going on there, but it is not an easy result on either side. the first thing i tell my first amendment students is if you think this is an easy decision on either side, rethink it. so i think one of the things the american constitution society is supposed to do and is doing and what this organization is doing is to get us to do what greg

said we should do which is sit down and really listen to each other and talk to each other and figure out what it is that we're trying to accomplish so we become a little bit more sensical on some of these issues. >> well said. greg? >> thank you. you asked for some american free speech imperialism early and it wasn't quite time for that yet. but for closing statement i do want to say this and it is something that i take very seriously and i think that -- we feel very proud and confident on this panel, that free speech and the first amendment will be well protected, but i think to a degree we're kidding ourselves. free speech is in trouble in the rest of the world. i mean we had an article about gary trudo showing sympathy for what amounts to blasphemy laws. and you -- i don't care what -- there is no argument you could have international blasphemy law regime and still have freedom of speech. i think there is a serious threat from hate speech laws. most of the rest of the world has national security laws that

we find -- we would find terrifying to a degree. and i'm -- i do get a little bit -- i think to a degree first amendment won't mean nearly as much. i think the right to be forgotten is disastrous potentially. and i think unless we're actually making strong, moral, philosophical and practical arguments about free speech, though, implying not just under the american first amendment, but understanding free speech as an international human right, it is not going to survive very long in the u.s. in this way i'm arguing for a global first amendment. i think it should be protected to be an oddball anywhere in the world to believe what you want anywhere in the world. >> thank you for that. mark holden. >> i agree with that but global first amendment, but i agree with the sentiments for sure. here is where i am on it. we heard last panel talking about the criminal justice reform area and how that's brought a lot of different groups together that you

wouldn't think could be in the same room and it has. coke would like to find more of those issues. i don't know if they're out there or not. we would like to think there are. we like to think we have good ideas to add to the discussion. we would like to use our first amendment rights as individuals and as a corporation to have a dialogue across the aisle with other groups about issues of common interest. there is a lot of them out there. criminal justice reform is one. but if you look at that issue it is the tail end of the problem. we're talking about economic opportunity, that's a big issue. we need to talk about our education system those types of things. we have ideas, we know our friends on the other side have ideas. we would like to have a discussion around that instead of everybody going to their corners, throwing names around, running ads, and fund-raising off each other. >> what an exhilarating discussion. we have disagreed about aspects of the application of first

amendment and the principles to situations from campaign finance to the regulation of political speech, but agreed about hate speech and the send criminal tytral centrality of the american tradition and bill and mark talked about something we have seen throughout this day, there say real value to bringing people who disagree fundamentally together on audience and in the stage, listening respectfully to each other so we can identify areas of agreement and disagreement. your job now ladies and gentlemen, first of all, is to go and have a drink which you've earned after this great discussion. but also to take the -- answer the question i raised to each of the panelists and think about what each of you will do over the next year to celebrate freedom, to participate in debates about it, and to encourage other americans to do the same. this is about sfrlelf-education. educate yourself. you have to learn about the

arguments on all sides of these complicated debates so you can make informed decisions. that requires reading up on the history of the institution and the cases that gave rise to it. learning about the arguments, the constitutional and other arguments on both sides and not assuming that either is right in advance and ultimately realizing that this one document is the thing that binds us, we disagree about so much in this room, but all of us agree about the centrality beauty and power of this greatest document of human freedom and history the u.s. constitution. thank you to freida levy. i want to bring her back up to the stage after an incredible day for making this remarkable conversation possible. and give her and our panelists a round of applause. hooray for freedom!

>> republican presidential candidate chris christie the governor of new jersey holds a town hall meeting later today at molly's tavern and pub in new boston new hampshire. live coverage starts at 7:00 p.m. eastern on c-span. in april, the institution project hosted its annual constitutional champions gala in washington, d.c. senators patrick leahy of vermont, rand paul of kentucky and twitter were recognized for their leadership and work in defending the constitution. in particular, digital privacy issues changing the mandatory sentencing policy, and national security.

>> good evening. i'm jenny sloan and i'm president of the constitution project. i'm delighted to welcome you here to our 8th annual gala honoring this year's constitutional champions. senators patrick leahy and rand paul and twitter for their work in the areas of criminal justice detainee treatment and privacy reforms. i want to especially welcome our past champions who are here tonight, judges bill sessions and pat wald and bill shields. [ applause ] while acrimony seems to pervade so much of politics today, the constitution project demonstrates that it doesn't always have to be that way. obviously individuals and organizations may and do

disagree vehemently about what the constitution means. but for two -- but for nearly two decades, tcp has surmounted many of these disagreements by sponsoring groups of experts from across the ideological spectrum to seek constitutional acceptance. it's the bipartisan inclusive nature of our work that leads credibility and influence. this year we're focusing on three vital areas. first, how can we maintain public safety while ensuring that our government exercises its law enforcement and national security powers in a fair, humane and constitutional manner? we know that systemic failures in our criminal justice system come at a high individual economic and societal cost and that especially since 9/11 the growth of our national security apparatus is threatening some of our most basic rights and protections.

the second area is how we should safeguard personal information, privacy and first amendment rights that are increasingly affected by rapid, sophisticated and complex technological innovations. finding a balance between private and civil liberties and a need for security is a constant long time struggle. given new technologies, it is increasingly easy for the government to monitor our personal lives and it is more important than ever that our constitutional rights still apply in the digital age. our third area of focus is how can we make government more open and accountable. sadly, it seems the government standard practice now is one of nondisclosure. since an informed citizenry is vital to our representative form of government, tcp is working to break down barriers to government transparency, facilitating the oversight we

need to monitor what our government does in our name. i'd like to highlight some specific examples of our work before turning to our awards. two years ago our bipartisan blue ribbon task force released a 600-page report examining the treatment of suspected terrorists in the clinton, bush and obama administrations. the task force and staff of tcp thoroughly examined available public records and interviews and conducted on the ground fact finding all over the world. our report remains the most comprehensive of its kind. the task force made three alarming findings. first, that u.s. personnel engage in torture. secondly, that the decision to torture was made at the highest levels of government. and third, that the public

record contains no persuasive evidence that torture produced significant information of value. as with all of our reports, we use this one to further or education and advocacy work. task force members supported by tcp staff use their expertise, influence and access to persistently lobby congress and the administration to make public the senate intelligent committee's report on the cia's detention and interrogation program. finally last december a declassified executive summary was publicly released. its findings and recommendations closely mirror many of those of our own task force. unfortunately the executive branch seems to be largely ignoring the senate report and some in congress want it withdrawn from public view. incredibly representatives of most of the