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To see a video of Ralph Nader's remarks, click the below link and open the file with Quicktime.
Nader Video - Open with Quicktime
Would the United States become a police state if there were another major terrorist attack on our country? Why did law professors, deans, and lawyers not stand up to the constitutional violations of Bush and Cheney? What determines the curriculum of Harvard Law School? Why do contracts professors minimize the importance of adhesion contracts, when they constitute 99% of what we sign? Is it true that 80% of the lawyers represent 20% of the people?
In his visit to HLS on Friday, October 30th, Ralph Nader ‘58, implored students in the audience to ask these questions of the government and the school’s administration. “You don’t have any idea how you are respected when you speak out collectively as law students,” he said. Nader began his career as a public advocate while a student at HLS half a century ago. His articles in the Harvard Law Record examined America’s corporations and political parties with a critical eye, and when he graduated he drew on his work at the Record to write the book Unsafe at Any Speed (1965), which brought to light the need for federal regulation of auto industry titans like General Motors. The result was the enactment of mandatory safety standards that have saved millions of lives and improved vehicle efficiency. “That came out of the Harvard Law Record. It would not have come out of the Harvard Law Review,” said Nader.
Over his decades of public advocacy, Nader has been instrumental in the creation of numerous public interest organizations and the enactment of several landmark pieces of legislation aimed at protecting citizens, including the Safe Drinking Water Act and the authorizing statutes for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission. More recently, he has waged three major, national campaigns for President, in 2000 as the candidate of the Green party and in 2004 and 2008 as an independent candidate.
Author of over thirty books, Nader’s latest work is a “practical utopian fiction” that lays out a blueprint of how to change America from both the top-down and bottom-up. Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! begins with an incensed Warren Buffett responding to the Hurricane Katrina disaster by organizing an impromptu relief effort to assist New Orleans survivors. Inspired by his ability to help the most vulnerable through forceful application of his wealth, Buffett organizes a convention of fellow billionaires and media moguls to devise a plan for reversing the degeneration of American civil society. “The missing element of the equation for public interest and progressive groups is that they don’t have enough money,” said Nader. The book, Nader’s “answer to Ayn Rand”, chronicles the Super-Rich crusaders’ quest as they mobilize community organizers in every congressional district around the country and push against the corporate control of Washington politics. “The conversation is very acute, very provocative, fresh, but I didn’t want any magic wands. The detail is to show it could happen if the money is there, because the talent is out there. The solutions are on the shelf.”
But Nader expressed serious concern about the ability of the next generation of HLS alumni to apply their efforts and their imaginations to the problems facing our country. “Without elevated imagination, we don’t go anywhere. If your imagination is not elevated, you don’t have a vision of possibilities. If you don’t have vision of possibilities, you don’t have reach. If you don’t have reach, you don’t have a grasp. And let’s face it, we grow up in cultures that set our imaginations at a certain level.” During his time at HLS, Nader found the culture of the school to be an oppressive series of measures designed to cow students into submission to a legal order dominated by corporate firms. “I gravitated to the Harvard Law Record because that was the law writ large. That’s where I found elbow room to ask the questions of justice and injustice, and what are lawyers for, and what’s the difference between lawyers and attorneys?” Whereas attorneys are the partisan advocates of their clients’ interests, Nader believes a lawyer is someone who asks the bigger questions about justice and the purposes of the law. The process of inquiry, said Nader, should begin for law students while they still have the freedom to write about subjects they would enjoy pursuing after graduation. “It’s very important for law students, while you are free to do it, before you are out working 100 hours a week in these pressure cooker, corporate law factories, to raise that imagination level.”
Beyond just imagination, Nader urged students to take up the tools of normative analysis with zeal and work for justice in the relationship of individuals to institutions. “If you don’t have fire in your belly, it doesn’t matter what you do in the area of reform.” Nader pointed to Rosa Parks and the sit-down strikers who formed the United Auto Workers as examples of the power of having resolute conviction in demanding justice from society.
Students should not, he said, adopt the skepticism of the academy with respect to normative thinking, because conceptions of justice and injustice are questions that require examination through normative dimensions. Analytical champions like 7th Circuit Judge Richard Posner ’62 are, according to Nader, empirically starved and intellectually arrogant.
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