PREFACE: A GOVERNMENT OF LAWS

     Americans almost unanimously celebrate that ours is a
government of laws.  But consensus quickly breaks down if we try to
define just what we mean by that.  
     Law in our pluralistic society has many sources and takes many
forms.  Huey Long, Louisiana's celebrated Kingfish, was not the
only bureaucrat who insisted that the law was whatever he said it
was.  The law clearly is what the United States Supreme Court says
it is -- especially when we are speaking of federal constitutional
law.  Congress, on the other hand, can have the final say on
federal statutory law -- so long as the President agrees or his
opposition is overridden by two-thirds votes in both houses.  State
courts and\or state legislatures have the last word on the laws of
the various states.  And the people collectively have ultimate
power in our democracy to impose their own will as to the law on
the governing branches  -- including the power to change federal
and state constitutions as well as their elected representatives. 
     Because there are so many buttons that might be pushed, the
process of making, changing and enforcing law in these United
States is complex and often messy.  I have been involved in trying
to influence the development of public policy -- which is, at
bottom, the making of law -- in one way or another all of my adult
life.  The effort has been often frustrating, but always
exhilarating.
     I actually began working in a law office at the age of 17,
but, for reasons which will become apparent, I did not enter law
school until I was 31.  In the interim, I attempted to shape the
law by public agitation: gathering petitions to public officials,
organizing public meetings and demonstrations, writing and
disseminating printed materials, reporting for newspapers and
magazines and running political campaigns.  At any given moment, I
usually had a pretty good idea of how I wanted to influence public
policy, even if my own goals were revised somewhat from time to
time.
     Once I had a law degree in hand, I discovered that my
opportunities to influence changes in the law were increased many
fold.  I was no longer relegated to importuning others to importune
some distant power center to do something.  My law degree and bar
admissions were a passport to the inner sanctum of the law,
courthouses where sat judges who had the authority and power to
actually order new rules for governance.  
     I admit that not all lawyers look at the practice of law that
way.  For most, law reform is not a major objective.  They
represent clients who seek not to change the law, but to attain
some specific relief according to its traditional rules.  To the
contrary, I have always viewed myself as a public interest lawyer,
a calling rather unique to the United States, where our
constitutional system has made courts of law into potent vehicles
for social change.  While my clients did have specific personal
objectives which I tried to realize for them, to me clients
represented opportunity to establish or implement legal principles
which would have wider social impact: protecting individual privacy
against harassment by police officers; establishing principles of
racial justice; implementing rights of free speech, especially for
grass roots organizations without large advertising budgets;
defending political activists against intrusive and threatening
government practices, including electronic and physical
surveillance; expanding the right to vote; protecting the rights of
the poor and powerless to some minimum level of human needs. 
     I also discovered that being a lawyer gave me special entree
to the legislative halls where statutes were debated and enacted. 
My first official posting on Capitol Hill came because early in my
academic career I had taught labor law.  As a result, I was thrust
into the center of the legislative battle over Labor Law Reform. 
A decade later, after I had established something of a reputation
as a civil liberties lawyer, I was invited back to Washington to
serve as special counsel to Congressional committees dealing with
broad constitutional issues of national security, separation of
powers and official accountability. 
      Involvement in partisan politics and two failed campaigns for
election to the House of Representatives were natural outgrowths of
my early brush with the workings of Congress together with my life-
long commitment to influencing public policy.  
     But through it all, the two most stable aspects of my
professional life over the course of thirty years have been the
training of future lawyers as a member of the faculty of Rutgers
Law School, Newark, and my activities on behalf of the American
Civil Liberties Union, which I have served as General Counsel for
two decades.  
     This is my story of a life of the law.  It is not a story of
constant triumph.  My side lost at least as many battles as it won. 
It is a story of the unending struggles that go on throughout our
land in a wide variety of forums over efforts to expand personal
freedom and keep government off the backs of the people, which, to
my mind, is what our constitutional system is all about. 
                                   January 1997