Hosted by the college of law entitled the new lincoln lectures what lincoln means to the 21st century. We are privileged to be hearing from a remarkably accomplished and ideologically diverse set of national thought leaders on lincolns legacy and his continuing relevance 150 years after his passing. As i said when i introduced our inaugural lecturer bob woodward in january, the law school has chosen to focus these lectures on Abraham Lincoln in part because lincoln undeniably is among the greatest lawyers in americas history. The fact that he assumed many other important roles president , legislator, military strategist, newspaper owner, etc. Merely adds to his legacy , and his legend. As we know, many of the themes of lincolns life and his lifes work, the treatment of race and noncitizenship, the relationship between the federal government and the states, the scope of executive power, the interplay between the president and the Supreme Court, the conduct of a president ial Election Campaign in a time of bitter partisanship among others dominate discourse today, nearly as much as in lincolns era. So this remains the right time for all americans to reflect on lincolns meaning to each of us and all of us. This is especially true for those of us here at illinois. In a real sense, the university of illinois, located between springfield and chicago is mr. Lincolns university. As we and Champaign Urbana prepare to celebrate our own centennial next year, we must never forget that we were among the first of the landgrant universities created in 1867 by the act signed into law by mr. Lincoln five years earlier and the only one in the original group founded in lincolns home state. And who better to help us at this time and in this place, think about what we can learn from lincoln as a country and as man thanman george will, one of the finest minds this region has ever produced. He was born and raised in champaign where his father was on the faculty here. He attended the Child DevelopmentLaboratory Program in town and went on to graduate from the University Laboratory high school. He worked for the now defunct or , urbana courier newspaper where i understand he had a friendly rivalry with roger ebert who worked summers in champaign. From champaign, mr. Will went on to Trinity College and Oxford University and then on to princeton where he earned his phd. And the rest as they say is history. He is undeniably one of americas most prolific and influential thinkers and writers. His 12 books include one mans america, statecraft. His regular column has been syndicated by the washington 1974 and today appears in about 500 newspapers. He was a panelist on this week. He has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for commentary, other awards were editorial writing, among many others. In 1986, the washington journal called him perhaps the most powerful journalist in america. And the Chicago Tribune has dubbed him americas leading poet of baseball. For me, three things stand out above and beyond his innumerable contributions and accolades. First is his telephone fame. I refer here not to fox news or on the sunday talk show this week although i must say i learned a lot about how to think as a lawyer by watching him on that show on sundays in the 1980s and 1990s even though he, like Abraham Lincoln, never attended law school. He is such a household name that like Mickey Mantle and joe made into a was character in seinfeld. Second, is his loyalty and dedication as evidenced by the fact that he is a diehard cubs fan. I have tremendous respect and affection for cubs fans and i , wish he and the cubbies well but i think it only fair to tell him he will have to wait until 2017 since my San Francisco giants win in election years. Finally, moving from the diamond to the gridiron, he has reported to have said it speaks badly for a university to have a good football team. On this point, i must disagree but i should add sobservation is true, i very much hope that the converse is also true. If so, over the past few years, greaterbeen an Even University than i could have imagined. It is my pleasure to welcome mr. Wills to the podium. Before he begins his remarks, although today is super tuesday, kindly, he has framed his remarks around president lincoln and the meaning he has to him so he will not do a Political Roundup in his remarks. After the formal program, there will be a q and a and he will take wideranging broad questions at that time. Let us welcome him out onto the stage. [applause] george will thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, dean for that generous introduction that proves that not all forms of inflation are painful. With regard to the cubs, it is the case that i only write about politics to support my baseball habit. You talked about waiting. I have been waiting 107 years since 1908, the last time they won the world series which was two years before mark twain died. That 107 year rebuilding effort is over. Now, to the 16th rather than the 45th president. Here in sumter, illinois where men are men and i am from people , develop or at least in the 1940s and 1950s, they did develop what i consider an admirable midwestern reticence about themselves. Although i left Champaign Urbana to go to college in 1958, four months after my 17th birthday, i have never, not for moment, not ever stopped thinking about myself as a midwesterner. I am in the words that are the title of hamlin garlands once famous book published 99 years ago, a son of the middle border. As such, i still it here to what i consider a midwestern reserve in talking about myself. I maintain a midwestern inclination not tohare my feelings with others and to thank others for not sharing their feelings with me. [laughter] which is why there hangs up on my office door in my Washington Office in the georgetown section, a framed new yorker cartoon that is my personal proclamation against todays confessional culture. The cartoon depicts a man dressed in a suit and tie and reclining rather stiffly on a psychiatrist couch with the psychiatrist sitting behind him, pen and notebook in hand. The cartoon is captioned and the man on the couch says look, call , it denial if you like but i think what goes on in my personal life is none of my own damn business. [laughter] however, the deans agreeable summons to speak on this occasion was an invitation that was somewhat biographical. Do list as it were a curtain and Say Something about a formative influence on my thinking and my lifes work. One influence on my lifes work i should say was work, some of it related to this university. One of my summer jobs was as a human scarecrow, to chase birds away from an experimental garden plot run here on the campus. Back in the day, i was a pin setter this was before automation in a Bowling Alley in the atlanta union. Another summer, i worked for a local Building Supply company that supplied the concrete for the roof of the assembly hall. However, the largest influence on my lifes work was and still is Abraham Lincoln. Who i have come here to explain why, one of the most important events in my life, one that continues to shape my thinking about the most fundamental problems of the nations public life is an event that happened , 87 years ago. 87 years actually before i was born. The event was the work of another man from illinois, senator stephen a douglas. The event was 1854s enactment of the kansasnebraska act. It is not too much to say that a great question posed by that act continues to reverberate in the nations life and certainly in my professional life. It reverberate in the nations life, not just because the civil war is the hinge of American History, and the kansasnebraska act which repealed the missouri compromise of 1820 was unquestionably the spark that lit the fuse that led to war. If the civil war was not an irrepressible conflict before 1854, it certainly was after that. The missouri compromise had been the work of henry clay. Lincoln, in the first of his seven 1858 debates with Stephen Douglas called my idea of a statesman. The compromise somewhat diffused the slavery issue and sectional animosities for three decades. It did so by forgetting slavery forbidding slavery in the louisiana territory north of the line that included the kansas and nebraska territories. The kansasnebraska act introduced by senator douglas empowered the residents of those two territory to decide whether or not to have the institution of slavery. The acts premise was that the distilled essence of the american project is democracy and that the distilled essence of democracy is majority rule. And that therefore, it was right that there should be popular sovereignty in the territories regarding the great matter of slavery. People should have the right to vote it up or vote it down. Lincoln disagreed. He responded to the act with patient,led, kenny, but implacable be hermits. Implacable vehemence. The most morally luminous career in the history of american democracy took its bearing from the principle that there is more to americas purpose, more to justice than majorities having their way. Considering my origins in the land of lincoln, there is a personally satisfying imagery which i did not recognize at the time. And the fact that 50 years ago, i submitted to the Politics Department of Princeton University a doctoral theertation titled beyond reach of majorities. The title came from the Supreme Courts 1943 opinion in west virginia. The second of the flag salute cases involving Public School children who were jehovahs witnesses. As told by professor noah feldman of new york history University Law school, in his splendid history, the two cases which culminated in one of the most striking reversals by the court in its history began on an october morning in 1935 in minersville, pennsylvania when william a 10yearold fifthgrader refused to salute the flag during the pledge of allegiance. The teacher tried to force his arm up but william held on to his pocket and successfully resisted. The next day his sister lillian, 11, a fifthgrader, also refused to salute the flag. Explaining to her teacher the bible says in exodus chapter 20, that we cannot have any gods other than jehovah god. At that time, feldman explains, the flag salute closely resembled the straight arm nazi waste except that the palm to be turned upward and not down. The National Leader of the jehovahs witnesses had recently given a speech announcing the not see salute and several witnesses children around the country had come to the conclusion that lillian explained to her teacher. Saluting the flag was idolatry. Lillian and william were shunned at school. The Family Grocery store was threatened with violence and boycotted. School district changed saluting the flag from a custom to a legal duty and the children were expelled from school. Their case went to the Supreme Court. As war clouds lowered over the world, the context was not favorable to the witnesses. They were pacifists. They had opposed u. S. Participation in the First World War and were opposing any u. S. Involvement in any war in europe. In june 1940, days after the nazi troops marched into paris, the court ruled 81 that the School District had the power to make saluting the flag mandatory. The opinion for the court was written by Justice Felix frankfurter, a former member of the National Committee of the American Civil Liberties union. He was jewish. He had been born in austria. , which the nazis had occupied in 1938. As a jew, he was anxious to avoid practices that allowed schoolchildren to be treated differently because of their religion. The case of millersville versus the family said quote an an interest in fairy or to none in the hierarchy of legal values National Unity is the basis of , national security. Frankfurter said his personal opinion was that the school board should allow the witnesses children their dissent. He was however as most political progressives had been for many decades, an advocate of judicial restraint regarding the actions of democratically elected bodies. And he thought the court should acknowledge that the elected school board had made a defensible, meaning reasonable, joyce expressing the will of the majority of its constituents. The eight members of the majority had all been appointed to the court by president Franklin Roosevelt whose anger , with the courts refusal to be deferential towards congresss enactment of the new deal legislation led to his illfated attempt to attack the Supreme Court. Casene dissenter in the have been appointed by president Calvin Coolidge who i should say , parenthetically was the last president with which i fully agreed. [laughter] minersvilles flag salute law was unique in the history of angloamerican legislation because it forced the children to express a sentiment which as they interpreted, they do not entertain and which violates their deepest religious convictions. So, deference to the School Boards legislative judgment amounted to the surrender of the constitutional protection of the liberty of small minorities to the popular will. As feldman says in 1940, the idea that the court should protect minorities from the majority was not the commonplace that it would later become. Stone had first introduced it in 1937, burying it in a footnote. Indeed, this became one of the most famous and consequential footnotes in court history. Taking their cue from the court, many communities across america made the flag saluting mandatory. There was an upsurge of violence against witnesses including that by a mob of 2500 people who burned down the witnesses kingdom hall in kennebunkport, maine. 1943, with the world war raging, the court agreed to another flag salute case concerning jehovahs witnesses for the purpose of overturning the decision that it had reached 36 months earlier. Writing for the majority and a 63 decision, Justice Robert jackson who had not been on the court when it was decided said the following the very purpose of the bill of rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy to place them beyond the reach of the majorities and officials and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the court. Fundamental rights may not be submitted to a vote. They depend on the outcome of no elections. First as a graduate student, and then briefly as a professor of political philosophy, and now for more than four decades as a washington observer of american politics and governance, i have been thinking about the many vexing issues implicated in these two flag salute cases. The issues include the source of american rights, the nature of the constitution, the role of the Supreme Court in construing it. And what fidelity to democracy requires regarding the rights of majorities. This is why i say that the kansasnebraska act reverberates in my professional life, it forced the nation and decades later, me to confront to , confront a question that constantly takes new forms but never goes away. It is the question of the limits of our commitment to majority rule. It is the question of how majoritarian we should be in our public life. This is a question of particular moment here at this distinguished law school because it concerns two questions that are, i hope and assume at the , center of Legal Education and scholarship here. The first is the nature and purpose of a written constitution. The second is the legitimacy of judicial review and particularly whether judicial review really does involve what has been called a counter majoritarian dilemma. There are those, and they might be an american majority, who believe that majority rule is the sovereign American Value that trumps, if you will pardon the expression, all others. They believe that the degree of americas goodness is defined by the extent to which majorities are able to have their way. Such people are bound to believe that it is the job of the Judicial Branch of government to facilitate this by adopting a modest deferential stance regarding what legislatures do. And regarding what executive Branch Officials and agencies do. Here, judicial deference is said be dictatorial dictated this began with the presidency of Andrew Jackson but did not fully flower into modern Communications Technologies especially radio and then , Television Changed the nature of the american regime by changing the nature of political campaigns and of governance. The current belief is that because president s alone are elected by a national constituency, they are unique embodiments of the national will and hence should enjoy the maximum feasible untrammeled latitude to translate that will into policy. The twofold problem is that majorities can be abusive. And some questions are not properly submitted to disposition by majority rule because there are some, actually there are many, closed questions even in an open society. But we must ask, how aberrant, how frequent are abusive majorities . A