This is the Libertarian Podcast from the Hoover Institution.

I'm your host Tom Church and I'm joined as always by the Libertarian Professor Richard Epstein.

Here at Hoover, Richard is the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior fellow. He's the Lawrence A Tish

Professor of Law over at NYU and he's a senior lecturer at the University of

Chicago. Now Richard there's a free speech story that caught my eye,

and I think there's a conversation to be had about censorship

and protests at the university level I want to ask you about.

Now the short of it is that Kansas Supreme Court Justice Caleb Steagle wrote a public letter to the University of Kansas law school and ended his teaching relationship over a recent controversy involving a speaker at a federal society event.

Now the speaker that was invited and actually end up speaking is affiliated with the Alliance defending freedom.

It's a conservative Christian group that is in addition to other issues against same-sex

marriage. When the event was announced the student body called for well many people

in the student body called for the event to be canceled and in his letter Justice Stiegel notes that there says

that the administration at KU met with the Federal Society and pressured them to cancel

the event. Now the event actually happened and the speaker discussed Kennedy versus Bremerton School District. It's a case that was decided in June of this year six to three.

So before we get into the KU law school's reaction and well calls for you know

cancelling this event can you take us through that case that Kennedy versus Bremerton

School District to see how I want to get a picture of how egregious the talk could have been.

Well, I mean the topic here is one that is generally divided in vexed large numbers of people.

We've had multiple discussions of this at

NYU and at Chicago. I've written about it on the Hoover website. Essentially

it's a question of what's the interaction between public private activity.

What we did is we had a coach in the Bremerton school district who used to lead his students in prayer and many of them very much thought it was appropriate.

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