War and civil liberties

Should we be concerned about civil liberties? Or is national security more important now?

Patrick Baude, the Ralph F. Fuchs Professor of law and public service at the IU School of Law-Bloomington, will address these issues during a public lecture during the seventh annual Freshman Honors Colloquium Scholar’s Symposium.

Active in the legal community, he has been a special counsel to the Office of the Governor of Indiana, and a member and past president of the Indiana Board of Law Examiners. Occasionally, he handles test cases in the state and federal courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court. His experience with war and civil liberties began when he took the Vietnam era case of Hess v. Indiana to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1973, he said. Gregory Hess was brought to trial for encouraging anti-war demonstrators in Bloomington to escalate their activities. At one point, he yelled an obscenity. The Supreme Court overturned Hess’ conviction on the grounds that his speech was protected because it was not “obscene,” did not constitute “fighting words” and was unlikely to produce imminent lawless action.

“The conventional wisdom is that civil liberties have always suffered in wartime and rebounded in peace,” Baude said. “This is an oversimplification and a rationalization. Some of the greatest advances in civil liberties have occurred in wartime—consider the Emancipation Proclamation—and some of the worst threats happened in peacetime—the anti-immigration raids of the 1920s. My aim is to see the forces behind the slogans.”