BY MITCHELL TROPIN

A six-year old Jamin Raskin is watching television when breaking news interrupts his favorite cartoon show. A newscaster announces that Jamin's father, Marcus Raskin—along with Dr. Benjamin Spock and the Rev. William Sloane Coffin Jr.—have been arrested by federal officials and charged with advocating resistance to the military draft. The elder Raskin faces 20 years in prison.

Sitting through the trial in Boston, Jamin felt "the great weight of a government prosecution" and saw how the government can try to take away liberties, such as freedom of speech.

Decades later, Jamin Raskin is sounding the call for Americans—especially progressives—to reclaim liberties being taken away by today's Supreme Court, which he sees as intent on reversing years of progress in expanding personal freedoms.

Raskin has been touring the East Coast promoting his latest book, Overruling Democracy: The Supreme Court vs. The American People (Routledge Press). Published in March, the book makes the argument that the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Williams Rehnquist has become "one of the most ferociously activist and anti-democratic courts in history."

The book is, however, only a part of Raskin's continuing effort to fight for civil liberties and to instill an appreciation for the Constitution.

Raskin has spent most of his life in the Washington area, growing up in Adams Morgan and learning to appreciate the District as a "warm small town." Jamin's dad, Marcus, served in President Kennedy's administration and co-founded with Richard Barnett the Institute for Policy Studies. Jamin's mother, Barbara, is the author of several books, both fiction and non-fiction, including the New York Times bestseller, Hot Flashes.

Raskin calls the arrest and trial of his father "a formative experience, even for a six-year-old." Sitting through the trial, Raskin was terribly troubled because the ordeal raised tough questions about what is right and wrong. The young Raskin even approached the family pediatrician, a Dr. Washington, asking him why the government wanted to take his dad away to jail. Marcus Raskin was found guilty and sentenced to two years in jail, but a federal appeals court overturned the conviction.

Raskin views his life as "growing up in an environment of progressive politics." His relatives, who included an activist judge in Milwaukee and a progressive state senator from Minnesota, were "people who were passionate and about law, politics and language," he says.

After his father's encounter with the government, and helped by his family background, Raskin decided he wanted a life immersed in the law. He first studied law at Harvard and then served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney General in Boston. Today, he continues his love affair with the law as a professor at the Washington College of Law at the American University.

Since becoming a professor, Raskin has taken on many notable legal challenges, such as fighting the exclusion of Ross Perot, and later Ralph Nader, from presidential debates, and suing to obtain real representation in Congress for the District of Columbia. His experience as a public interest lawyer has taught him plenty about the American legal system.

"When I was an assistant attorney general, I won all my cases, and I thought this was the greatest role on earth," he says. "Then I became a law professor and started doing public interest work. I started losing. I realized I had been winning because the government always wins."

While the government seems to always have an advantage, Raskin contends that matters have reached the critical stage because of the Supreme Court's current activist role. Overruling Democracy reflects Raskin's frustration from seeing the Supreme Court over the last decade "strike down progressive laws that have come out of the democratic process."

Saying "a little interference with democracy goes a long way," Raskin recites a list of legislation that the Supreme Court has undermined or gutted: the Violence Against Women Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, the Brady Handgun Violence Act, and the Fair Labor Standards Act. The ultimate insult came in 2000, Raskin contends, "when the United States got its first court-appointed president."

Reclaiming democracy from conservatives and the Rehnquist Court will take a rethinking of traditional liberal attitudes, he adds. "Liberals have traditionally defended minority rights, but we also need to recognize that we are a majority under attack from a right-wing minority," he says. "We are losing, because in a structural sense, the fix is in."

The curly-haired professor has drawn sharp criticism from conservative groups for calling the Supreme Court's decision on the Gore-Bush election "quite demonstrably, the worst Supreme Court decision in history." Raskin maintains that the court's ruling against Gore was not a momentary lapse of judgment by five conservative justices, "but the logical culmination of their long drive to define an extra-constitutional natural law enshrining the rights of white electoral majorities, like the one that brought George W. Bush the White House."

Raskin says the Court has a choice: "Either read the Constitution as a freedom charter that tries to facilitate democratic self-government, or read it as charter of powers given to the government." The Court has chosen the latter, he says.

Defending civil liberties is insufficient to deal with the current judicial "re-activism." Arguing for a new "constitutional patriotism," Raskin wants constitutional amendments to protect the democratic rights which the high court has read out of the document.

"Conservative forces have figured a way to lock up the constitutional and legal process. We need to take it back," he says.

What troubles Raskin is that the Rehnquist Court, in his opinion, has taken away what used to be a powerful tool for minorities and the oppressed: the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution, or the Equal Rights Protection Clause.

"The Court has been twisting the Equal Rights Protection Clause to the point that it is becoming the major barrier to social progress in the country," Raskin asserts. "[The clause] now works best for white plaintiffs challenging affirmative action and voting districts with minority majorities, and for large corporations."

He notes that Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas have never voted to uphold a claim under the Equal Protection Clause when the plaintiff was a minority.

Raskin's book has some positive items, such as the bright future for vote-swapping in the future. Raskin believes that both the Gore and Nader camps did themselves a grave disservice by not supporting, and in some cases opposing, efforts by Internet-based organizations to promote vote swapping.

"Even if Nader and Gore's people did not pick up, the Republicans certainly did," Raskin says. "Republicans were scared stiff by vote swapping."

Raskin has been an advocate for many groups on First Amendment Rights, although it has put him in some awkward positions. He wrote an animus brief in support of anti-abortion groups that were being sued by the National Organization for Women under the statute used to fight organized crime, better known as RICO. NOW said that groups such as Operation Rescue were extorting money from abortion clinics by denying patients access. In March, the Supreme Court dismissed the NOW suit on an 8-1 vote.

Raskin says a victory by NOW would have harmed activist groups. The Court's decision "will keep a lot of progressive causes from being destroyed by government," he maintains. "If NOW had won its case, civil rights protesters would be sent away for 20 years for extortion."

"Thank God it was pro-life protesters who were named in the case, because the court's conservatives would not have ruled the same if it had been unions or anti-war protesters," he says.

Even with his busy schedule, teaching remains a key part of Raskin's life. "What I love about the classroom is the extraordinary openness and spontaneity," he says.

To maintain that spontaneity, Raskin enters the classroom with a brief agenda. But "in the intervals and margins, anything can happen."

In 1991 Raskin combined his love for constitutional law and for teaching and created the Marshall-Brennan Fellowship Program, named in honor of the late U.S. Supreme Court Justices Thurgood Marshall and William J. Brennan, Jr. The project mobilizes second- and third-year law students to teach a course on constitutional rights and responsibilities in D.C. high schools, including a special curriculum on the history and future of democracy and the right to vote.

The program also holds moot court competition, which address a host of constitutional issues. A recent issue debated was why lesbian couples can't openly kiss during a high school prom when straight couples are allowed to do so.

Raskin also is participating in a unique labor program. He chairs Maryland's Higher Education Labor Relations Board, the nation's only state panel dedicated to labor issues on the state's universities and colleges.

"Maryland has taken the high road in saying, ‘We can't have universities and colleges where people who work there have no rights, or cannot participate,'" he says.

Since 2001, Raskin has chaired a five-member panel, which oversees the collective bargaining process at the16 state university campuses. Raskin sees the board playing broad powers to help universities define their collective bargaining units, establish election procedures, certify union locals, and resolve election disputes, as well as investigate and act on unfair labor practices complaints.

Raskin's long-running interest in political rights has paid off for Takoma Park. In 1992, he was a member of the Takoma Park Redistricting Task Force, which was grappling with a dilemma: some wards in the town had twice the voting population of other wards because they had large concentrations of non-citizens. The task force considered several alternatives, such as redrawing the wards according to the voting population, but that is not legal.

Raskin started researching the issue and made a fascinating discovery: For most of the 18th and 19th century, the United States did not condition voting rights on whether or not the individual was a citizen.

"What mattered was whether you were 21, white, and owned property," he says.

With that knowledge in hand, Raskin stepped forward with a solution: "why not keep the wards as we have them, but give everyone the right to vote?" Non-citizen voting rights were later approved in a city referendum and the matter survived a court challenge.

Raskin represented Takoma Park on a pro bono basis. He also co-founded with George Leventhal the "Share the Vote" Campaign that campaigned for non-citizen voting rights.

"Today, many communities exclude aliens from participation. I'm proud to be part of a community that has extended them this political recognition," Raskin says.

In 1997, Raskin was involved in another project that involved the First Amendment, the local community, and students at Montgomery Blair High. Blair students were producing a live monthly television show for the Montgomery County school system's cable channel, and wanted to have a debate on gay marriage rights. The debate would include two conservatives and two liberals. At the suggestion of the cable system manager, the students agreed to tape the show in advance, rather than broadcast live, and submit it to him.

However, once the manager saw the tape, he refused to air it. The students appealed the decision to then School Superintendent, who backed the manager. Undaunted, they enlisted Raskin.

The cable manager was asked why the tape would not be shown. He replied that he did not like the way the guests were talking about God.

"As a First Amendment lawyer, that's music to my ears, because they were openly admitting they were censuring speech based on its content and its viewpoint," Raskin says.

The students and Raskin then brought their case to the Montgomery County School Board. Slowly, beginning in Takoma Park, parents throughout the Blair district stood up in support of the students' demand for First Amendment rights. The school board responded by overruling Vance, saying the tape could be shown.

The incident led Raskin to write We the Students: Supreme Court Cases For and About Students (CQ Press). The book, sponsored by the Supreme Court Historical Society, has sold more than 10,000 copies, continues to be a popular, and is in its third printing, according to CQ Press.

When the book was published, the Historical Society held a reception at the court to honor Raskin and his accomplishment. Justice Anthony Kennedy sponsored the event.

"Nobody from the Court has called me about my latest book," Raskin adds.

Jamin lives with his wife, Sarah, and their three children, Hannah, Tabitha, and Tommy.