This is the Libertarian

the Libertarian Podcast from the Hoover Institution. I'm your host Tom Church and the Libertarian is

Professor Richard Epstein. Richard is the Peter and Kirsten Bedford senior fellow

here at the Hoover Institution. He's the Lawrence A Tish Professor of Law at

NYU and is a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago.

And Richard, it's Chicago I want to talk about today.

You had a column yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, co-authored with Michael Ratcheless about the controversy surrounding

President Obama's presidential library and it's been over five years since

President Obama stepped down from the presidency, finished it and normally I

think we'd expect to see a bit more progress on a

presidential library but instead there's an ongoing legal fight and financial woes to talk about

so Richard help me out here why is there any legal challenge here in the first place?

I'm glad the first thing to help you out with is you have the wrong description of the project.

It is a presidential center, it is not a library.

This is not a terminological difference. If you're a library you are

governed by a statute known as NARA, which is the one involved with a lot of the Trump

papers, the national, you know, these Archive and Research Affiliation,

so they have all the papers,

and the building essentially cannot be over 70 feet high

and has other restraints.

The Obama's wanted to build this tower in Jackson Park, which is a world-class historical

town park designed in 1869 or so by Frederick Law Olmstead and generally regarded as the greatest landscape

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