ACLU legal director emphasizes coming Supreme Court term

To Steven Shapiro, the ACLU's legal director, civil liberties are fragile — a notion he said many young people have trouble grasping.

"Unless we defend them, unless we continue to fight for them, they can disappear," he said. "We're never going to live in a country that provides absolute freedom or absolute equality."

The American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland hosted Shapiro at the Hoff Theater Tuesday night for a talk called "The Supreme Court and Your Civil Liberties." The title was deceptively simple, however, as Shapiro covered everything from his New York Mets obsession to the future of new Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor.

Despite the lack of student turnout at the event — three students attended, two of who were from other schools — Shapiro said that today's civil liberties issues are of vital importance to young Americans who may take their rights for granted

"The future of this country — and I realize it sounds trite, but it's true — the future of this country lies with the next generation of leaders and citizens and they come from places like the University of Maryland," Shapiro said. "And I believe that students care deeply about these issues even if they don't think frequently about these issues. I think those are two different things. And I hope I can get people to think a little bit about these issues and, you know, we're going to turn over the country to your generation, and I want to leave it in good hands."

The setting was intimate: Attendees barely filled four rows of seats, and no microphone was needed for the town hall-style question-and-answer session that followed Shapiro's speech and a short film on the history of the ACLU.

The 10-minute film, full of montages of patriotic protests throughout the 20th century, paired with Shapiro's focus on matters of civil liberties in a post-9/11 world gave a heavy tone to the event.

"I think the country, therefore the court, is continuing to grapple with the fallout from the Bush administration's anti-terrorism policies, and we are continuing to deal with that at many different levels," Shapiro said in an interview before the event.

These struggles, he said, include fights over what he described as the government's "rendition program" — kidnapping people from other countries and bringing them back to U.S. facilities or other countries for interrogation — and the Obama administration's decision not to release photos depicting detainees in U.S. custody in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Supreme Court will decide whether or not to hear the case in the next month or so.

But the ACLU is concerned with a broader range of issues than he had time to explore during his speech, including the fight for gay marriage, reproductive rights and voting rights.

"There's this constant, endless series of issues that we're grappling with," he said.

While it appears unlikely that an abortion case or gay marriage case will reach the Supreme Court this year, Shapiro said that's no reason to abandon these issues.

"I do believe though, and I believe very strongly, that we will see gay marriage in the United States in our lifetime," he said. "And I think at some point that down the road — and I don't think it's a distant point down the road — we will all look back and say, ‘what was the fuss about?'"

In terms of Sotomayor, Shapiro agreed with the mainstream commentary that the ideological split of the high court will likely remain unchanged, as Sotomayor replaced liberal justice David Souter. And despite his assertion that Sotomayor will not vote for the ACLU on every case — nobody does, he said — he said he looks forward to seeing what impact her unique perspective will have.

"She grew up as a member of a racial minority, she grew up poor, and she grew up as a woman," he said. "And I think all of those perspectives are perspectives that are desperately needed on this Supreme Court. And I have no doubt that over time, she will influence the way the court thinks and talks about some of these issues in a way that I expect to be positive."

aissacs@umdbk.com