Garrett Epps.

• Position: Conference to honor Professor Dershowitz - Speech

MR. EPPS: Thanks, Paul. Paul's invitation to come to this conference and honor Professor Dershowitz, whom I will call Professor Dershowitz since we've barely met and I never was a student, arrived, luckily, on a Thursday. And I say luckily because on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, I say to myself, that Alan Dershowitz, what a brave civil libertarian, terrific scholar, great force in American life. On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, that Alan Dershowitz, what a troublemaker, he's completely wrong about everything. On Saturday, I rest.

But really, regardless of what day it arrived, I would have had to say yes because Professor Dershowitz has unwittingly been an inspiration to me throughout his career. I first heard his name when I was editor of the student newspaper at Harvard, and the administration, which was weary of anti-war demonstrations, formed a group called the Committee on Rights and Responsibilities. And I, as a civil libertarian, I think when you have the government forming a group to tell you what your responsibilities are, there is a problem. And there certainly was with this group. They were basically hoping to purge a lot of the real troublemakers. And a lot of my friends fell into that category, by bizarre chance, and they went to the Harvard Law School--to all the great civil libertarians who taught there--and said, we need some help, we've got this--these trials coming up. And a number of these folks came back very disappointed because the eminent civil libertarians had appointments elsewhere or conflicts of interest or something. But they said, but there's this guy, Dershowitz. And so this guy, Dershowitz, came and helped these people with exactly the same sort of zeal he has deployed later in his career, even though he was representing them against his own administration. And I thought, that's kind of cool. And then I got a call from a friend, Felicity Berringer, who was the editor of the Stanford Daily, and she said, "Have you heard of this guy, Dershowitz? He's defending Bruce Franklin," who, of course, was the bet noir of the Stanford administration, the student--not--a faculty radical. And I thought, wow, you know, coast-to-coast troublemaker, this is very impressive.

And later in life, when I was thinking of going to law school after my years as a journalist, I read, The Best Defense, a terrific book if you're considering whether the role of representing people whom some people find morally dubious is worth adopting in life. And it really confirmed me in the idea that, decrepit as I was at the age of thirty-eight, I might be able to contribute something by going to law school and studying law. Much later, when I was a clerk on the 4th Circuit, Professor Dershowitz came through doing what he modeled in the book: defending a very unpopular defendant, still attempting to demonstrate the innocence of Jeffrey MacDonald, the so-called Green Beret Killer whose conviction, under very complex and clouded circumstances, continues to puzzle people as to the--whether justice really was served in that or not. So I thought, in honor of Professor Dershowitz I would write a brilliant essay carrying on, elucidating, bringing forth the unexplored implications of his essay, Shouting Fire, which was written in 1989 in the Atlantic about the famous metaphor Justice Holmes uses, stating that the most stringent protection of free speech would not protect one who falsely shouts fire in a crowded theater thereby causing a panic. And I was going to, you know, build on this foundation something brilliant. I quickly discovered that's not possible because pretty much Professor Dershowitz said everything that rationally can be said in that short essay about what's wrong with this metaphor. And so, I decided still I would do a meditation, probably in a minor key rather than in the key of brilliance, and I found the title to this talk because I spoke just before I came here--I had to speak at the birthday celebration for Thaddeus Stevens in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and I told my host I was on my way to talk about fire in a crowded theater. And he said, 'You know, I was--when I was sixteen, I was an usher and there was a fire in the theater, and there were a lot of people there and they told me to go get the people out." And he said, "I thought that was kind of odd because I was the sixteen year-old. Why didn't somebody who knew something about it do it?" I said, "Well, what did they say to tell them?" He said, "Well, they said, 'Tell them there's a problem with the projector and they have to leave.' And the people said, 'Why do we have to leave because there's a problem with the projector?"' He just kept saying, "There's a problem with the projector." and, "Get the people out." So the title of my talk is A Problem with the Projector. And it opens with a film. For those of you who have seen the film, The Magnificent Yankee, which was made in the early 1940s, it is a bio-pic about Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, based on a Broadway play. And, supposedly, narrated by Owen Wister, the famous author of The Virginian and other western novels. And in this movie, two unbearably acute Supreme Court justices, Justices Holmes and Brandeis, kind of totter around Washington talking over all the issues that come before the Court and trying to figure out the right answers. And they go to the zoo, and they go to the Capitol, and they go to the Washington Monument and various places. And every now and then--they're at the zoo, and Brandeis says, "Well, you know, if somebody yelled fire here, there would be a stampede and people would be hurt." And Holmes says, "yes, you can't yell fire in a crowded zoo." And--taking notes this is kind of puzzling--and then later in the movie they're--they go by the circus. And Brandeis or Holmes says, "you know, if somebody were to yell fire in that circus tent there could be a stampede and people would be hurt." And Holmes says, "Yes, you can't yell fire in a crowded circus." And I--this took me a long time to--what? They never say the right quote. What's going on? And then I realized, probably when the film was originally shot they used the correct quote and then somebody from the studio, Darryl Zanuck or somebody, said, "Nobody is saying burning theater in one of my pictures." All right. So they had to go back and put in the zoo and--but the--this film ends. This film, shot early in the war, ends. Its final scene is the ninety-two-year-old Holmes on the verge of death, awaiting the visit paid to him on Inauguration Day 1933 by Franklin Roosevelt, which is a historical event. After being sworn in, the President went to visit Justice Holmes. You never see the President. What you see is Holmes drawing himself up to attention, like the soldier he had been in the Civil War, saluting like this, waiting for his Commander in Chief. And the point of the film is that you can't yell fire in a crowded whatever. In war time, no one can criticize the war. No one can criticize the Commander in Chief. It is the ultimate extension of the misuse of the metaphor documented in Professor Dershowitz's essay.

As he says in that essay, "fire in a crowded theater" is probably the wide--widest spread and most generally misused metaphor in American legal history. The reasons for that are complicated. My colleague at Oregon, Robert Cy, has done some very interesting historical research about what fires in mass venues meant at the time that Holmes used the term. They were much more frightening phenomena because there was a sort of yearly spectacle of improperly protected buildings burning with large loss of life. And so, "fire in a crowded theater" was very vivid. But it's also just because of the way it sounds. And I came across an essay by Terry Eagleton, the British literary critic, in a book called How to Read a Poem...