CAREER
Service to Academic Institutions
Service to Public Institutions and Foundations
Service to the Legal Profession
Welcome to my website!
This website was created while I was a candidate for public office in the summer of 2004. It has been revised and is now being maintained to present my views on numerous public issues, and for use by students, academic friends and critics, descendants and relatives, and any strangers who happen upon the scene.
For over sixty years, I have been engaging in public affairs and expressing my views on current issues. In 2008, I serve as a precinct captain for the Democratic Party, and on committees of the North Carolina Bar, NC Advocates for Justice, and NC AARP. I am engaged in encouraging the North Carolina legislature to enact a false claims law to reward whistleblowers who detect corruption in our state or local government. I also continue to advocate campaign finance reform in our state.
In national matters in 2008, I played a very minor role in persuading Congressmen to protect contract farmers from mandatory arbitration clauses disabling them from enforcing their rights against food processing firms. I had in 2001 represented the National Automobile Dealers Association in a similarly successful cause. I continue to encourage broader legislation to protect consumers and others from this form of oppression. In 2009, there is at last the prospect of correcting the distortions of the 1925 Federal Arbitration Act imposed by the Supreme Court since 1980.I am also engaged in efforts to enhance the methods by which our highest state court judges are selected and in the national debate about judicial independence and accountability.
Since 2004, Roger Cramton and I have invested effort in elevating interest in and concern for the law governing the Supreme Court of the United States. We share the view that the Court has evolved in the last half century in ways that not unreasonably diminish public support for judicial independence, a condition indispensable to the rule of law.
Also in 2008, I became involved with a notable and diverse group seeking to establish more effective methods of deterring transnational corruption, an objective that has risen to the top of the agenda of OECD.
I continue to work on a manuscript entitled Democracy at the Courthouse: The American Tradition of Private Enforcement of Public Law. The work will suggest that if the world is to succeed in dealing effectively with abuses of the environment or the corruption of government in weak states, it may be necessary to accept the need for contingent fee lawyers empowered to discover information in private files, perhaps with a role for lay decision makers who are invulnerable to intimidation or capture.
These diverse interests are categorized and indexed in the column on the right so that anyone sharing an interest can see what I think about a matter without being burdened with any other information. I welcome the thoughts of any reader, but especially on those topics.
On the left column below the image are links to a curriculum vita supplemented by brief accounts and some links to previous utterances of an autobiographical sort. Those curious about my 2004 campaign will find answers under Political Activity. For kinfolk and anyone curious about the source of my questionable views, there is also a link to my family connections. I pray that I have not neglected them. For Thanksgiving 2008, we celebrated our sesquicentennial: Bessie and I and our four children have been married for 150 years!
INTERESTS: No doubt I would have done better to concentrate my efforts over fifty years on fewer subjects, but it would have been less fun.
Academic Freedom and Civil Liberties
Criminal Law and the War on Drugs
International Relations and Comparative Law
Judicial Independence and Accountability: State Courts
Legal Profession: Contemporary
Local Government and Public Education
Supreme Court of the United States
Transnational Dispute Resolution