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In which the 3-Ds make their brains hurt pondering some of the unponderable ethical issues in popular science fiction. Star Trek, of course, did this almost weekly -- especially on Voyager with such memorable examples as the Tuvix conundrum, or the right to suicide for Quinn. (Trigger Warning: Quinn's example leads to an extended discussion on the secular and religious quandary on taking one's own life.) And in our age of emerging AI, Next Gen gives us the debate on whether Data (or any machine) can have the same rights as any human. Terminator, The Matrix, Star Wars: ethical issues abound, and the 3-Ds stumble through them all. Or at least all they could think of in 45 minutes! ------------- For more of our shenanigans, be sure to follow us on Twitter! We're @churchnspace. ------------- Credits: Editor Extraordinaire: Cathy Rinella of Merodi Media Co-Producers & Co-Hosts: Dave Kamphuis & Drew Nelsen Producer & Plucky Sidekick: Dan Mushalko ------------ "Ethics is knowing the difference between what you have a right to do and what is right to do." - Potter Stewart
Potter Stewart an associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court once said, “Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself.” Censoring artists, intellectuals is not a new thing. Today to discuss more about censorship we have Ajit Rai with us on Audiogyan. We'll be talking about banning and censorship in films in the Indian context. This episode will be bi-lingual but mostly in Hindi. Listeners have to bare with my Hindi questions but Ajit sir will cover my shortcomings.
This case about discrimination on the basis of pregnancy might have you thinking that Potter Stewart said "trans rights are human rights." Absolutely not. Mans said "get back in the kitchen, wench."If you're not a 5-4 Premium member, you're not hearing every episode! To get exclusive Premium-only episodes, access to our Slack community, and more, join at fivefourpod.com/support.5-4 is presented by Prologue Projects. Rachel Ward is our producer. Leon Neyfakh and Andrew Parsons provide editorial support. Our researcher is Jonathan DeBruin, and our website was designed by Peter Murphy. Our artwork is by Teddy Blanks at Chips NY, and our theme song is by Spatial Relations.Follow the show at @fivefourpod on most platforms. On Twitter, find Peter @The_Law_Boy and Rhiannon @AywaRhiannon. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
The foundation of fruitfulness for the 21st century is being a knowledge worker with a keen mix of past, present, and future. But, wait, just what is a knowledge worker? Join Kevin as we work to corral this core identity that is so necessary for our continuous impact for excellence both in our workplaces and for the Kingdom. // Download this episode's Application & Action questions and PDF transcript at whitestone.org.
Hello again, friends. After pro-choice protesters showed up outside the homes of Justice Samuel Alito and two other justices — peacefully chanting while walking in the street that lacked sidewalks — the editorial board of the Washington Post described such protests as “problematic” because they “bring direct public pressure to bear on a decision-making process that must be controlled, evidence-based and rational if there is to be any hope of an independent judiciary.” I'm sympathetic to this view. It's one thing to picket the Supreme Court as an institution; it's quite another to demonstrate in front of the homes of individual justices. But surely the pro-choice protesters have a First Amendment right to be heard. I'm reminded of a 1994 case (Madsen v. Women's Health Center, Inc.) in which the Supreme Court upheld the First Amendment rights of anti-abortion protesters to picket the residences of employees of an abortion clinic, saying the ordinance barring such protests within 300 feet of such residences was too broad. The underlying question is how to weigh the First Amendment rights of protesters against the privacy rights of individual justices. The irony, of course, is that Justice Alito's leaked opinion finds no right to privacy in the Constitution. Please consider a paid or paid gift subscription to sustain this newsletter***Alito's leaked decision has led me to reflect back on my years briefing and arguing cases before the Supreme Court almost fifty years ago. The Court I argued before understood that its role was to balance the scales of justice in favor of the powerless. The two political branches of government (Congress and the executive branch) could not be relied on to do this. Republican appointees to the Supreme Court understood this role as did Democratic appointees. Even Richard Nixon's appointees — Harry Blackmun, Lewis Powell, and Warren Burger — exemplified this. It was Blackmun who wrote the Court's 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, and Powell and Burger joined him, as did four Democratic appointees to the Court — William O. Douglas, Thurgood Marshall, William Brennan, and Potter Stewart.The cases I argued were insignificant. I was a rookie in the Justice Department who was given either sure winners or sure losers to argue because the Department didn't want to take a risk on a rookie — a wise move. (At my first argument, I mistakenly referred to Justice Stewart as Justice Brennan, which caused the two of them to guffaw and me to be mortified.)But I was in awe of that Court. I especially recall Douglas, who had recently suffered a stroke and was in obvious discomfort, looking sharply at me as I made my arguments. Here was the justice who wrote the 1965 decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, finding that a constitutional right to privacy forbids states from banning contraception — a right that would be jeopardized by Samuel Alito's current analysis because, again, Alito doesn't recognize a privacy right in the Constitution.Douglas was also the man who decided that the Vietnam war was illegal and issued an order that temporarily blocked sending Army reservists to Vietnam. He was the justice who wrote in the 1972 case Sierra Club v. Morton that any part of nature feeling the destructive pressure of modern technology should have standing to sue in court — including rivers, lakes, trees, and even the air — because if corporations (which are legal fictions) have standing, shouldn't the natural world?Sitting not far away from him on the bench was Thurgood Marshall — who two decades before had succeeded in having the Supreme Court declare segregated public schools unconstitutional, in the 1954 landmark Brown v. Board of Education. Marshall did more than any person then alive to break down the shameful legal edifice of Jim Crow.Douglas, Marshall, and Blackmun were the intellectual leaders of that Supreme Court. Their opinions gave the Court its moral heft. They drew not only from the Constitution as written but also from the nation as it had evolved. They understood the moral leadership America needed to protect the rights of the voiceless and the powerless. Today's Supreme Court majority doesn't have a clue about the Court's moral authority, and couldn't care less. They are political hacks, rigid ideologues, and small minds intent on entrenching the power of the already powerful, comforting the already comfortable, and inflicting pain on the already inflicted. (Five were nominated by presidents who lost the popular vote. Three were nominated by a president who instigated a coup against the United States; they were confirmed because a rogue Republican Party mounted scorched-earth campaigns to put them on the Court.) The intellectual leader of today's majority (if “intellectual” is the appropriate adjective) is Samuel Alito, perhaps the most conceptually rigid and cognitively dishonest justice since Chief Justice Roger Taney (who authored Dred Scott v. Sanford in 1857, finding that Congress had no power to exclude slavery from the territories and that Black people could not become citizens). The authority of the Supreme Court derives entirely from Americans' confidence and trust in it. As Alexander Hamilton wrote in the Federalist Papers No. 78, the judiciary has no influence over “the sword” (the executive branch's power to compel action) “or the purse” (the Congress's power to appropriate funds). The Supreme Court I was privileged to argue before almost 50 years ago had significant moral authority. It protected the less powerful with arguments that resonated with the core values of the nation. Americans didn't always agree with its conclusions, but they respected it. That respect and trust allowed the Court to lead the way, charting a moral course for the nation. Today's cruel and partisan Supreme Court majority is squandering what remains of the Court's moral authority. That is perhaps the deepest tragedy of all. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe
Our interview this week is with Francis Fukuyama, a fellow and teacher at Stanford and a renowned scholar and public intellectual for at least three decades. He is the coauthor of the Report of the Working Group on Platform Scale. It's insightful on the structural issues that have enhanced the power of platforms to suppress and shape public debate. It understands the temptation to address those issues through an antitrust lens – as well as the reasons why antitrust will fail to address the threat that platform power poses to our democracy. As a solution, it proposes to force the platforms to divest their curatorial authority over what Americans (and the world) reads, creating a host of middleware suppliers who will curate consumers' feeds in the way that consumers prefer. We explore the many objections to this approach, from first amendment purists to those, mainly on the left, who really like the idea of suppressing their opponents on the right. But it remains the one policy proposal that could attract support from left and right and also make a real difference. In the news roundup, Dmitri Alperovich, Nick Weaver, and I have a spirited debate over the wisdom of Google's decision to expose and shut down a western intelligence agency's use of zero day exploits against terrorist targets. I argue that if a vulnerabilities equities process balancing security and intelligence is something we expect from NSA, it should also be expected of Google. Nate Jones and Dmitri explore the slightly odd policy take on SolarWinds that seems to be coming from NSA and Cyber Command – the notion that the Russians exploited NSA's domestic blind spot by using US infrastructure for their attack. That suggests that NSA wants to do more spying domestically, although no such proposal has surface. Nate, Dmitri, and I are united in thinking that the solution is a change in US law, though Dmitri thinks a know your customer rule for cloud providers is the best answer, while I think I persuaded Nate that empowering faster and more automatic warrant procedures for the FBI is doable, pretty much as we did with the burner phone problem in the 90s. The courts, meanwhile, seem to be looking for ways to bring back a Potter Stewart style of jurisprudence for new technology and the fourth amendment: “I can't define it, but I know it when it creeps me out.” The first circuit's lengthy oral argument on how long video surveillance of public spaces can continue without violating the fourth amendment is a classic of the genre. Dmitri and Nick weigh in on Facebook's takedown of Chinese hackers using Facebook to target Uighurs abroad. Dmitri thinks we can learn policy lessons from the exposure (and likely sanctioning) of the private Chinese companies that carried out the operation. Dmitri also explains why CISA's head is complaining about the refusal of private companies to tell DHS which US government agencies were compromised in SolarWinds. The companies claimed that their NDAs with, say, Treasury meant that they couldn't tell DHS that Treasury had been pawned. That's an all too familiar example of federal turf fights hurting federal cybersecurity. In our ongoing feature, This Week in U.S.-China Decoupling, we cover the “Disaster in Alaska” evaluate the latest bipartisan bill to build a Western technology sphere to compete with China's sector, note the completely predictable process ousting of Chinese telecom companies from the US market, and conclude that the financial sector's effort to defy the gravity of decoupling will be a hard act to maintain. Always late to embrace a trend, I offer Episode 1 of the Cyberlaw Podcast as a Non-Fungible Token to the first listener to cough up $150, and Nick explains why it would be cheap at a tenth the price, dashing my hopes of selling the next 354 episodes and retiring. Nick and I have kind words for whoever is doxxing Russian criminal gangs, and I suggest offering the doxxer a financial reward (not just a hat tip in a Brian Krebs column. We fewer kind words have for the prospect that AI will soon be able to locate, track, and bankrupt problem gamblers. I issue a rare correction to an earlier episode, noting that Israel may not have traded its citizens' health data for first dibs on the Pfizer vaccine. It turns out that what was deidentified aggregate health data, Israel offered Pfizer which with proper implementation may actually stay aggregate and deidentified. And I offer my own hat tip to Peter Machtiger, for a student note in an NYU law journal that cites the Cyberlaw Podcast, twice! And more! Download the 355th Episode (mp3) You can subscribe to The Cyberlaw Podcast using iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Pocket Casts, or our RSS feed. As always, The Cyberlaw Podcast is open to feedback. Be sure to engage with @stewartbaker on Twitter. Send your questions, comments, and suggestions for topics or interviewees to CyberlawPodcast@steptoe.com. Remember: If your suggested guest appears on the show, we will send you a highly coveted Cyberlaw Podcast mug! The views expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not reflect the opinions of their institutions, clients, friends, families, or pets.
Hola, maricoper. Biden, Breyer y Fox News.Bienvenido al maricoffee, un repaso de titulares relevantes y temas que dan para reflexionar un rato mientras te tomas el primer café de la semana.Test de actualidad. Como cada lunes, la mejor forma de poner a prueba lo pendiente que has estado de los titulares en la última semana. Aquí el enlace.¡ÚNETE A NUESTRO DISCORD! Puedes sumarte al Discord de La Wikly a través de este formulario. Nuestro compañero Luis Galindo te echará un cable.Qué bonita familia. Bienvenido a La Wikly.
Welcome to the Unicorn Meta Zoo, a podcast by members of the Stack Exchange community team. If you want to avoid spoilers, jump straight to the audio. Participants We are talking about aspects of leadership in our communities. Links Abby’s definition of a leader reminds me of the Potter Stewart test. Joel’s book is Smart and Gets Things Done. We set up a Team just for out moderators to share their wisdom and knowledge. Our elections uses a single transferable vote system for taking your preferences into account. Meta “This is the no touching podcast.” This is certainly correct since none of us are even in the same state. If anyone ever asks you to explain a double entendre, change the subject immediately as every word out of your mouth will instantly take on an unintended sexual meaning. My title really did change to Community Product Manager. It’s mostly ceremonial. “Unfortunately, as you probably already know, people” could be a leadership motto. It’s tempting to blame folks for problems we have as Community Managers. On the other hand, we benefit from leaders empowering others to accomplish our goals. I am forever in their debt. What do you think? Take a listen and respond in the answers below.
Internal commentary for the potential song title "Yar's Revenge Designer Howard Scott Warshaw Slam Dunks A Football" by The Flowers of Disgust appears here courtesy of The Flowers of Disgust: The football was innovative yet enigmatic. | HSW is in my view the most important pre-NES Era game designer from a creative standpoint, and I include Al Alcorn in this statement. | pre-NES or pre-Miyamoto? | Is there really a difference? I mean yes, I suppose you could date a so-called "Miyamoto Era" from the time he joined Nintendo in 1977, or maybe with his creation of Donkey Kong in 1981, but I really don't think this is what people normally think of when they think of Miyamoto's influence from a game design standpoint (Not to mention such a designation would completely ignore the meaningful contributions of Gunpei Yokoi, who was essentially Miyamoto's mentor on the project). While no serious person would claim Donkey Kong itself isn't historically significant, the game itself doesn't hold a candle to the likes of Super Mario Bros. or Zelda in terms of actual influence on the direction of video game design. In many areas DK is much more derivative than it is innovative, from its characters and plot (cribbed from King Kong and Popeye, among others) to its gameplay (which owes a lot more than is generally recognized to earlier titles such as Space Panic and Crazy Climber). What I think is actually the more important thing to recognize about Donkey Kong is the story of its development, from the last ditch effort to recoup the sunk costs of the Radar scope debacle to Hiroshi Yamauchi's decision to entrust NOA's future in the harebrained schemes of one low-level engineer -- and the lucky accident of its sucess. It's this spirit of throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks that continues to drive most of Nintendo's successes to this day. So in summary I would say that although Miyamoto's pre-NES work certainly represents an auspicious beginning to his career as a designer, he did not achieve greatness (nor his corresponding industry "rock star" status) until his later work for the NES/Famicom, which likewise did not become a true worldwide phenomenon until the successes of SMB and Zelda, among others. This is why I would argue that to say "Pre-Miyamoto" is essentially the same thing as saying "Pre-NES" from a periodizational perspective, which is the implicit perspective of all of our song titles and commentary. | Have you played "Space Panic"? That game SUUUUUUCKS! | No, but I did play Crazy Climber on an original cabinet last week, and the control scheme is pretty fascinating. There are two joysticks that have to be alternated simultaneously up and down to simulate (more or leass) the physical act of climbing. Takes some getting used to but it's really quite clever. | To me the important thing about Miyamoto isn't any particular game feature or innovation that he invented. The genius of Myamoto is really his ability to take an existing genre and carefully refine it so that it becomes more "fun". Hence, Donkey Kong is way more "fun" than Space Panic. Even though, through a certain narrow lens, Space Panic might be more "innovative", Donkey Kong is really a much more important game in the history of the genre. To go back to your original statement, I guess I think the central questions is: what do you mean by "from a creative standpoint"? I wonder if you aren't defining "creativity" a bit too narrowly when you dismiss Miyamoto's early arcade work. | Sure, that's probably a valid criticism. And I do agree with you in regards to Miyamoto's penchant for refining the innovations of others, and of course the "fun" factor remains something that is poorly understood to this day (On this particular point I would recommend Curtiss Murphy's excellent blog and podcast "Game Design Zen", especially his hugely insightful visual representation of what he and others term 'flow' which can be found in the post for episode 2). I just think if you're going to be so reductive as to say, "This here is 'The Miyamoto Era'" (and though you didn't use that exact term I think it's fair to say it's implied by your use of 'Pre-Miyamoto' as a delineator) then it makes far more sense to designate his work on the Family Computer as the herald of that era because, again, it was not until that point that he became an icon. It was not until that point that he did his most important, most innovative, and most influential work. It was not until that point that he fully emerged from the shadows of Yokoi et al. to finally wield complete control over what I would without hesitation call the Gesamtkunstwerk of SMB and Zelda. Donkey Kong is a landmark in the history of Nintendo, surely, but in the story of Miyamoto's development, it is mere prologue. | What?? | Please explain to which element(s) of the preceeding your query is referring. | Objectively speaking, I think the original Donkey Kong is probably more significant than Yar's Revenge in terms of it's impact, though admittedly, without defining precisely what we mean by 'significant', this is basically a nonsensical statement. With regards to fun, I think it's all well and good to explore the concept of "fun" on a objective/theoretical level. "Fun" may indeed be a wooly concept that, from a game-design perspective, is tricky to define in a purely reductive sense. HOWEVER we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that in our subjective experience as players-of-games, it is all too easy to identify when a game is "fun". One is reminded of the famous line by Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart, "I know it when I see it". Stewart of course, was referring to pornography, but it is equally applicable in this case. I can't tell you precisely what makes a game fun, but I know whether a game is fun or not when I play it. I will look this Curtiss Murphy gentleman though, as this does seem an interesting topic. | When did I ever say that Yar's Revenge was "more significant" than Donkey Kong "in terms of it's [sic] impact"? My original statement was focused solely on creativity of design, and did not reference DK at all. I freely concede that DK was more impactful than YR; I'm simply stating an opinion about Howard Scott Warshaw's artistic chops. At the risk of going off on a tangent, let's draw on, as an analogy, a comparison between Pong and Computer Space, Nolan Bushnell's prior effort from the previous year. Now I'm sure as hell not going to say Pong is poorly designed (the hallmark of good design often being simplicity, which is its own rabbit hole...), but what I will say is that Computer Space is a way more interesting game, at least considered intrinsically. While simple by today's standards, it failed essentially because it was designed and playtested exclusively by engineers and mathematicians, and hence was too confusing for the average n00b to grasp. I think there's room to argue which game is 'better' from a creative standpoint, but we should absolutely not make the mistake of saying Pong is artistically better than Computer Space specifically because of the former's relative success. Now, with regard to your rather confusing citation of Potter Stewart (who always makes me think of (Jimmy) Stewart's nemesis Mr. Potter from It's a Wonderful Life), I'm not certain what point you are trying to get across. Potter Stewart's statement is generally not quoted earnestly even by anti-pornography activitsts these days; are you reappropriating it into the arena of fun in video games in an effort to genuinely endorse the concept of subconscious objective identification as a process, or are you making a wry, pithy critique of modern gamers' fickleness/proclivity to rush to judgement? I am reacting specifically to your statement "...in our subjective experience as players-of-games, it is all too easy to identify when a game is 'fun'." [Empahsis added]. It seems like you are implying in this first part of your argument that we are making a mistake when we rely on our gut instincts when engaging in video game criticism, but then you go on to, it would seem, essentially endorse the Potter Stewart approach immediately thereafter. Could you clarify, please? | To clarify, I am endorsing the view of "fun" as something that we should generally trust our guts on, even though it is difficult to define in a reductive sense. In that quote, I should not have said "all too easy", but rather just "really fucking easy". Likewise I think Potter's statement re:pornography is in most cases correct, though I'll concede that it really doesn't lend itself to any concrete legislation–certainly not any good legislation. Re: HSW, Yar's Revenge, Donkey Kong etc… I think essentially we are struggling with different ideas about what "creativity" is, what it means for something to be "important" and certainly what it means for something to be "important from a creative standpoint". You seem to be endorsing the view that a game can be "important from a creative standpoint" when it is interesting but shitty. If you think "creativity" is really just about doing something "original" or "new", being the "first" to do some particular thing, then I guess that's a reasonable statement to make. I tend to take a more holistic view of creativity myself, put more emphasis on the overall artistic vision, and the execution thereof. | And I'm not necessarily disagreeing with most of that, I'm simply drawing a distinction between creative success (or artistic success, if you prefer) and commercial success. Frankly, I don't know what you're talking about when refer to something being "interesting but shitty"; are you saying Yar's Revenge is shitty?? Or are you referring to Computer Space/Pong/Crazy Climber/Space Panic? I'd say Space Panic is the only one of those you could credibly claim to believe is shitty, but for the sake of argument I'd say that yes, something can be interesting even if it is shitty. However I do concede it most probably can't be "important from a creative standpoint", at least in the sense that I employ that phrase (that it has exerts a lasting influence on at least some significant subset of game design). In this sense I think it's laughable to say that Yar's Revenge is not significant. If you look at HSW's body of work it seems to be his most fondly remembered game (or at least tied with Raiders) and he is easily the most celebrated Atari designer from that time period. | Yars' Revenge is ok I guess. It's certainly quirky, and I could see how people might have found it fun. If we're talking about single-screen space shootin' games i'd definitely take Robotron 2084 over it any day of the week. "Raiders", OTOH, seems completely unplayable and cryptic. I think people probably like to talk about the importance of Raiders because (like "Adventure") it seems kinda like a proto-adventure-game or proto-metroidvania thing. Fair enough I guess. Again, for my part, I'm less concerned with who "came up with" these ideas "first", and I'm more interested in who made games that were actually fun to play. When I look at "Raiders" I see a game whose designer was over ambitious and didn't really understand the limitations of the platform for which he was designing… an interesting failure at best. That's better than an uninsteresting failure, but not exactly the hallmark of a great game-designer IMO. Again, if all you care about is who was first-to-market with some particular "innovation", then sure HSW is your man.| That's all well and good, and such reductionism would be fine if we could all agree on an objective classification of what constitutes "fun", which is in my esitmation a fool's errand. However, since we are prisoners of our own predilections in taste, we cannot make a consistent, quantifiable analysis of any game unless we make the effort to subsume our subjective reaction underneath at least a veneer of cold, logical, data-driven criticism. Of COURSE it matters that we find a game "fun", but without the wisdom that comes from patient, comparative study of the titles that comprise its various peers, antecedents and imitators, and without appraisal given to the personalities and forces behind its genesis, our analysis is doomed to be incomplete. I'm not by any means saying that innovation is the only important thing to focus on, but I am fascinated by it because I yearn to gain a deeper understanding of how things developed and where they are likely to go in the future. That's what keeps me getting up in the morning, at least from a video gaming standpoint. | I prefer to think of my "fun" benchmark as more holistic than reductive. | Sure, and Id preferto be having sex with Scarlet Johanson, but that doesn't mean it's the case. | Zing! | Agreed. I think we're done here. Today's strip
When Chief Justice Earl Warren was asked at the end of his career, “What was the most important case of your tenure?”, there were a lot of answers he could have given. After all, he had presided over some of the most important decisions in the court’s history — cases that dealt with segregation in schools, the right to an attorney, the right to remain silent, just to name a few. But his answer was a surprise: He said, “Baker v. Carr,” a 1962 redistricting case. On this episode of More Perfect, we talk about why this case was so important; important enough, in fact, that it pushed one Supreme Court justice to a nervous breakdown, brought a boiling feud to a head, put one justice in the hospital, and changed the course of the Supreme Court — and the nation — forever. Associate Justice William O. Douglas (L) and Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter (R) (Harris & Ewing Photography/Library of Congress) Top Row (left-right): Charles E. Whittaker, John M. Harlan,William J. Brennan, Jr., Potter Stewart. Bottom Row (left-right): William O. Douglas, Hugo L. Black, Earl Warren, Felix Frankfurter, Tom C. Clark. (Library of Congress) Associate Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Whittaker at his desk in his chambers. (Heywood Davis) The key links: - Biographies of Charles Evans Whittaker, Felix Frankfurter, and William O. Douglas from Oyez- A biography of Charles Evans Whittaker written by Craig Alan Smith- A biography of Felix Frankfurter written by H.N. Hirsch- A biography of William O. Douglas written by Bruce Allen Murphy- A book about the history of "one person, one vote" written by J. Douglas Smith- A roundtable discussion on C-SPAN about Baker v. Carr The key voices: - Craig Smith, Charles Whittaker's biographer and Professor of History and Political Science at California University of Pennsylvania - Tara Grove, Professor of Law and Robert and Elizabeth Scott Research Professor at William & Mary Law School- Louis Michael Seidman, Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Constitutional Law at Georgetown Law- Guy-Uriel Charles, Charles S. Rhyne Professor of Law at Duke Law- Samuel Issacharoff, Bonnie and Richard Reiss Professor of Constitutional Law, NYU Law- J. Douglas Smith, author of "On Democracy's Doorstep"- Alan Kohn, former Supreme Court clerk for Charles Whittaker, 1957 Term- Kent Whittaker, Charles Whittaker's son- Kate Whittaker, Charles Whittaker's granddaughter The key cases: - 1962: Baker v. Carr- 2000: Bush v. Gore- 2016: Evenwel v. Abbott Music in this episode by Gyan Riley, Alex Overington, David Herman, Tobin Low and Jad Abumrad. More Perfect is funded in part by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, The Charles Evans Hughes Memorial Foundation, and the Joyce Foundation. Supreme Court archival audio comes from Oyez®, a free law project in collaboration with the Legal Information Institute at Cornell. Archival interviews with Justice William O. Douglas come from the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at Princeton University Library. Special thanks to Whittaker's clerks: Heywood Davis, Jerry Libin and James Adler. Also big thanks to Jerry Goldman at Oyez.
This story comes from Radiolab's first ever spin-off podcast, More Perfect. To hear more, subscribe here. When Chief Justice Earl Warren was asked at the end of his career, “What was the most important case of your tenure?”, there were a lot of answers he could have given. After all, he had presided over some of the most important decisions in the court’s history — cases that dealt with segregation in schools, the right to an attorney, the right to remain silent, just to name a few. But his answer was a surprise: He said, “Baker v. Carr,” a 1962 redistricting case. On this episode of More Perfect, we talk about why this case was so important; important enough, in fact, that it pushed one Supreme Court justice to a nervous breakdown, brought a boiling feud to a head, put one justice in the hospital, and changed the course of the Supreme Court — and the nation — forever. Associate Justice William O. Douglas (L) and Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter (R) (Harris & Ewing Photography/Library of Congress) Top Row (left-right): Charles E. Whittaker, John M. Harlan,William J. Brennan, Jr., Potter Stewart. Bottom Row (left-right): William O. Douglas, Hugo L. Black, Earl Warren, Felix Frankfurter, Tom C. Clark. (Library of Congress) Associate Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Whittaker at his desk in his chambers. (Heywood Davis) Music in this episode by Gyan Riley, Alex Overington, David Herman, Tobin Low and Jad Abumrad. More Perfect is funded in part by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, The Charles Evans Hughes Memorial Foundation, and the Joyce Foundation. Supreme Court archival audio comes from Oyez®, a free law project in collaboration with the Legal Information Institute at Cornell. Archival interviews with Justice William O. Douglas come from the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at Princeton University Library. Special thanks to Whittaker's clerks: Heywood Davis, Jerry Libin and James Adler. Also big thanks to Jerry Goldman at Oyez.