Columbia Law School enters The Bob Zadek Show not as a topic but as an affiliation. In the excerpts, the school is named only in connection with two guests and one public figure, and it is never discussed as an institution in its own right. What the sources establish is narrow: that Philip Hamburger has been a law professor there, and that Thaddeus Russell places Barack Obama’s enrollment there at a turning point in Obama’s self-presentation.
Philip Hamburger and the New Civil Liberties Alliance
Bob Zadek introduces Philip Hamburger as a law professor at Columbia Law School who has been there for about fifteen years and counting, and as the author of a great number of books The New Civil Liberties Movement (2021). Zadek describes him as a prolific writer who has written extensively and with great authority on the administrative state, which Zadek calls the fourth branch of government. Zadek also notes that Hamburger wrote a book, published some time earlier, questioning whether the administrative state was in total unconstitutional, and that Hamburger appeared on the show shortly after it was published.
Hamburger is further identified as the founder of the New Civil Liberties Alliance, which Zadek describes as a non-profit public interest law firm based in Washington, D.C., that protects constitutional rights from infringement by the administrative state. In his own words, Hamburger says he founded the organization about four years before the episode because he was dissatisfied with the way conservative and libertarian organizations were litigating to protect freedom, and he compares it to the ACLU, saying that the New Civil Liberties Alliance actually tries to defend civil liberties. He states that the organization has about 20 people in Washington, D.C., and many cases, and that it has already had a lot of good successes in pushing back against the administrative state. The theory on which it was founded, he says, is that administrative power is the greatest threat to civil liberties in the era, and that it is therefore necessary to focus on that and push back.
Hamburger’s account of the organization’s litigation centers on the Securities and Exchange Commission. He says the SEC goes after people who engage in insider trading, and that the New Civil Liberties Alliance does not object to regulating that, but objects that the SEC does so not just by an act of Congress but with its own rules that it invents and that are not law, prosecuting people in its own non-courts run by so-called administrative law judges who, in his description, are not really judges, do not give you a jury, do not give you due process of law, and are quite biased. He says the organization has been litigating against these tribunals and that the SEC has now largely given up bringing its cases in front of the administrative law judges, forcing them into district court. He then describes the case Spartan Securities v. SEC, in which he says the judge instructed the jury that guidance is not binding as law, and the jury acquitted the client on 13 out of 14 charges, with the fourteenth being small potatoes. Hamburger characterizes this as chasing the SEC out of its unconstitutional little administrative tribunals into district court, where, he says, the SEC cannot win.
Thaddeus Russell on Obama at Columbia
In a separate episode, Columbia Law School appears in Thaddeus Russell’s account of Barack Obama’s personal history. Russell says that Obama grew up fairly famously in Hawaii as a pot smoker, then went to Occidental College in Los Angeles, where Russell taught for a while, and was famous as a pot smoker there, and that he might have even dealt pot as a student there, but certainly smoked it Thaddeus Russell on Renegades vs. Conformists (2018). Russell then says that Obama goes to Columbia Law School and decides to reform himself, that this is all in Obama’s autobiography, that he becomes ashamed of the way he had been living, changes his name from Barry to Barack, and has lived a fairly abstemious life except for cigarette smoking ever since. Russell calls Obama the paragon of American discipline and the perfect American citizen.
The Columbia reference functions in Russell’s argument as the hinge of a renunciation narrative. Russell says he thinks that is part of the explanation for Obama’s aggressive attack on drug dispensaries, which Bob Zadek had raised as a puzzle: Zadek describes Obama as coming from a very progressive background, with antecedents in Berkeley, and as a student or friend of Saul Alinsky, and asks how that background squares with what Zadek calls Obama’s aggressive attack on drug dispensaries in California that were lawful under California law. Russell says he has never seen any evidence of the decision-making, does not know what Eric Holder and Barack Obama were saying in their meetings about it, and has never seen any reporting on it either, so how the administration was thinking about it is, as far as he knows, not public record yet. He offers the renunciation of his former self as part of it, and says that more deeply, because this is what the state has to do in a sense, he thinks Obama was disciplining local insubordination, state insubordination. The excerpt breaks off there, with Zadek beginning to respond that it was the federal government and Russell agreeing that it is federal versus state.
Across episodes
The two episodes do not argue the same question about Columbia Law School; they use the school for unrelated purposes. In the 2018 episode, Thaddeus Russell names it as the setting of Barack Obama’s self-reform; in the 2021 episode, Bob Zadek names it as Philip Hamburger’s academic home while introducing Hamburger’s work on the administrative state and the New Civil Liberties Alliance. The excerpts show no development in the treatment of the school between the earlier and later episode, because the school is not treated as a subject in either.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts say nothing about Columbia Law School’s founding, location, curriculum, faculty other than Hamburger, admissions, or institutional history, and nothing about any Columbia connection to the cases or organizations discussed. They do not state what Hamburger teaches, what his earlier book is titled, or what became of the litigation he describes. They also do not state what became of Obama’s studies there, what degree he received, or when he attended, beyond Russell’s placement of the enrollment between Occidental College and Obama’s later life. Any claim about the school beyond the two affiliations named here would exceed what the sources support.