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To Try a President
Harry Kalven Jr.
© Ernst Haas / Getty
Organizing my files recently, I came upon an unpublished article by my father, Harry Kalven Jr. It was the last piece he wrote before his death in 1974. I had forgotten that it existed. Reading it now, 47 years after he wrote it, is an uncanny experience, for it speaks with singular clarity and force to a central question of the moment: How should the legal system respond to crimes that a former president may have committed while in office?
A law professor at the University of Chicago, my father was an expert in several fields torts, taxation, empirical research on legal institutions but his consuming passion was the First Amendment. After suffering a heart attack in 1969 at the age of 55, he reordered his priorities and began to work on a book he had conceived of early in his career but had long deferred: an intellectual history of the Supreme Court’s encounters with the First Amendment. ....

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