A tribute to Dean James Huffman.

• Author: Funk, William
• Position: Testimonial

Google James Huffman sometime. Aspiring actor. (1) Confederate soldier. (2) Convicted murderer. (3) California bankruptcy attorney at FileBK.com. (4) Democratic Senator and failed gubernatorial candidate from Ohio. (5) Professor of history at Wittenberg University. (6) And not last and not least, James Lloyd Huffman 2d. Jim. Dean.

Others will write of his tangible accomplishments as Dean. I do not intend to demean them by not discussing them; they were substantial and real. Instead I want to address a more delicate subject and how it relates to Jim as Dean. That delicate subject is Jim's politics.

On the faculty we all have our own politics. Most of us, but not Jim, reflect the national law school faculty tendency to be liberal (7) in our politics, in the mainstream of Oregon voters--that is, we vote the Democratic ticket, not the Green Party ticket. Of course, there are exceptions to the liberal consensus. Jim is one of those exceptions. He is one of two Oregon lawyers listed on the website of the Republican National Lawyers Association. (8) He is a prominent member of the Federalist Society. (9) He has been a Distinguished Bradley Scholar at the Heritage Foundation. (10) He is on the board of the Foundation for Research on Economics & the Environment (FREE), (11) a leader in espousing free market environmentalism, and he has been excoriated by the Community Rights Counsel for his lectures at FREE's seminars for federal judges. (12) He successfully defended the constitutionality of Oregon's Measure 37 before the Oregon Supreme Court. (13) He testified before a congressional subcommittee to the effect that regulation of carbon dioxide by the United States Environmental Protection Agency would be unconstitutional as a violation of separation of powers. (14) And he has been a frequent conservative op-ed writer for papers as widespread as the Washington Times, (15) L.A. Times, (16) National Law Journal, (17) and Oregonian. (18) Most recently, Jim has had amicus briefs fried on his behalf in Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, (19) in support of EPA's failure to regulate carbon dioxide, and in Environmental Defense v. Duke Energy Corp., (20) challenging EPA's standard for requiring new source review in Clean Air Act attainment areas, both of which are before the Supreme Court this term.

One might assume that Jim's activism on behalf of conservative causes generally and anti-environmental causes in particular would cause a certain...