Stanley Kutler, American Legal Historian

Stanley KutlerThe obituaries for Stanley Kutler, a retired University of Wisconsin professor who passed away on April 7, tended to stress Kutler’s large role in obtaining public access to the Nixon Watergate tapes. Only 63 hours of those tapes had been released before Kutler’s lawsuit against the National Archives and Records Administration, but his efforts resulted in the release of more than 3,000 additional hours. Kutler and other scholars were then able to use material on the tapes to detail the Nixon Administration’s frequent and sometimes shocking abuses of political power.

Unfortunately, the obituaries largely overlooked Kutler’s decades of extraordinary work as a legal historian. His numerous books and articles include Judicial Power and Reconstruction Politics (1969), Privilege and Creative Destruction: The Charles River Bridge Case (1971), and American Inquisition: Justice and Injustice in the Cold War (1984). All of these works explored specific cases in the context of broader historical movements. The facts and social complexities of the cases were always more important for Kutler than were the rules and corollaries spouted from one appellate bench or another.

Kutler’s work as a legal historian placed him at the center of the “new legal history” that emerged during the 1960s.

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Karl Marx on Religion

marxReligious people sometimes express disdain for Karl Marx and his philosophies because he supposedly characterized religion as “the opiate of the masses.” It turns out that this isn’t exactly what Marx said. Furthermore, he wasn’t necessarily negative about religion and its role in social life.

Appearing in Marx’s projected but never completed A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy, Marx’s words on religion are of course in German.

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Big Tobacco Sues Uruguay

fda cigarette warning lungsThose who follow efforts to use law to reduce smoking will be aware the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia found in R.J. Reynolds v. FDA, 696 F.3d 1215 (D.C. Cir. 2012) that mandatory graphic imagery on cigarette packs was a violation of commercial speech rights. As a result of the decision, cigarette packs continue to have only prosaic warnings, which go not only unread but also, for the most part, unnoticed.

Foreign countries, of course, are not bound by U.S. law, and Uruguay forged ahead with its own laws requiring graphic warnings. They include photos of decaying teeth, premature babies, and disturbing hospital scenes, with each picture covering 80 percent of each pack. Big Tobacco cannot invoke its commercial speech rights in Uruguay, but Philip Morris has sued Uruguay for $25 million, alleging the required warnings violate treaties protecting intellectual property rights.

The case is in the courts, with former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg paying many of Uruguay’s legal costs. Smoking is on the rise in developing countries, and many think the decision in Uruguay will have significant impact on other developing countries’ willingness to require graphic warnings.

For my own part, I strongly endorse the required graphic warnings in the name of social justice. Smoking in both the United States and abroad is increasingly concentrated among poor and working-class men and women, and the health problems associated with smoking are also greater in these sectors of the world population. For the poor and members of the working class, reading skills and even any interest in written texts are limited, but poor and working-class smokers are aware of and receptive to visual imagery. If they could literally see what smoking causes, they might fight harder to break their deathly, addictive habit.

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