ZadekpediaColumbia Law School is mentioned in The Bob Zadek Show only as a biographical detail about two figures discussed on the program.
Thaddeus Russell on Barack Obama
In a June 2018 episode, guest Thaddeus Russell recounted Barack Obama’s trajectory from youthful marijuana use to what Russell characterized as a life of discipline. According to Russell, Obama grew up in Hawaii as a pot smoker, attended Occidental College in Los Angeles, and was famous as a pot smoker there; Russell added that Obama might even have dealt pot as a student, though he certainly smoked it. Russell then said that Obama went to Columbia Law School and decided to reform himself, becoming ashamed of the way he had been living, changing his name from Barry to Barack, and living a fairly abstemious life except for cigarette smoking ever since Thaddeus Russell on Renegades vs. Conformists (2018).
Russell offered this account while answering Bob Zadek’s question about why the Obama administration aggressively attacked drug dispensaries in California that were lawful under California law. Russell said he had never seen evidence of the decision-making behind that policy, and that how Obama and Eric Holder thought about it was not public record as far as he knew. He speculated that the crackdown was partly a renunciation of Obama’s former self as a pot smoker, and more deeply an act of disciplining local and state insubordination—federal versus state. The Columbia Law School reference thus functions in the episode as a marker of the self-reform Russell describes, not as a subject of discussion in its own right.
Philip Hamburger
In an October 2021 episode, host Bob Zadek introduced guest Philip Hamburger as a law professor at Columbia Law School who had been there for about fifteen years and counting. Zadek described Hamburger as the author of a great number of books and a prolific writer who had written extensively and with great authority on the administrative state, which Zadek called the fourth branch of government The New Civil Liberties Movement (2021).
Zadek noted that Hamburger had written an earlier book questioning whether the administrative state was totally unconstitutional, and that Hamburger had appeared on the show shortly after its publication. Zadek also introduced Hamburger’s newer book, Purchasing Submission: Conditions, Power, and Freedom, which Zadek said examines the use of the administrative state to coerce individuals, entities, and other branches of government into surrendering otherwise constitutionally protected rights. Zadek further identified Hamburger as the founder of the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a non-profit public interest law firm based in Washington, D.C., which Zadek said protects constitutional rights from infringement by the administrative state.
Hamburger himself, in the portion of the excerpt attributed to him, described founding the New Civil Liberties Alliance about four years earlier out of dissatisfaction with how conservative and libertarian organizations were litigating to protect freedom. He said the organization has about twenty people in Washington, D.C., and many cases, and that its founding theory is that administrative power is the greatest threat to civil liberties in the present era. He described litigation against the Securities and Exchange Commission over insider trading pursued through the agency’s own rules and non-courts run by so-called administrative law judges, and he said the SEC had largely given up bringing cases before those judges. He also described Spartan Securities v. SEC, in which he said the judge instructed the jury that guidance is not binding as law and the jury acquitted the client on thirteen of fourteen charges.
Across episodes
The two episodes that mention Columbia Law School—the June 2018 conversation with Thaddeus Russell and the October 2021 conversation with Philip Hamburger—do not treat the school as a topic of argument, and the episodes show no development in how it is discussed. In the earlier episode the school appears in Russell’s account of Obama’s self-reform; in the later episode it appears in Zadek’s introduction of Hamburger as a professor there. No question about the institution is argued in both, and no position advanced by one guest is taken up by the other.