This Lawyer Lets Free Speech Do the Talking

Amid his trumpeting of the Constitution, Bob Herman can’t escape the raised eyebrows of those curious about his choice of clients. Even his wife softly has pressed, “Why can’t you represent someone nicer?”

Over the years, he has hauled a University of Missouri campus to court over a school-owned radio station’s refusal to allow the Ku Klux Klan to underwrite a program. He failed in that quest, but he won the KKK the right to pick up trash under Missouri’s Adopt-A-Highway program.

When a woman wanted her Missouri license plate to read “ARYAN-1,” Herman drove her lawsuit to victory. And when white supremacist Matt Hale was deemed morally unfit for an Illinois law license, Herman went to bat for him, but lost that case, which wound its way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

More recently, he successfully sued the University of Missouri system for charging in-state students what amounted to tuition in violation of an 1872 law mandating free education for Missouri’s home-grown at any of four campuses. A judge has yet to decide possible remedies, including how far back the university’s refunds, if any, should go.

Still, Herman knows his name -- and notoriety -- may be intertwined with defending some clients whose views are branded indefensible and repugnantby the mainstream. Any smudge on his reputation, he said with a shrug, is just “guilt by association with the First Amendment.”

Just don’t brand him “the Klan’s Counselor,” as some have. Herman, who is Jewish, says he exploits free-speech dilemmas by such groups to ensure that no one’s rights are stifled.

“Open, vigorous debate is the only solution for the evils that these people represent, not suppression of their speech,” said Herman, 49. “Without the freedom to think and express what you think, you don’t have any freedom. Defending that and requiring government accountability is all part of the same cloth. You either buy it or you don’t.”

To fellow attorney Kevin O’Malley, Herman’s crusade -- or cause-lawyering -- is “totally consistent with who and what he is.”

“He undertakes intellectually curious cases one would expect to be handled by academics rather than practicing lawyers,” said O’Malley, who specializes in defending against medical malpractice suits and who briefly taught Herman in law school two decades ago. “He’s clearly on his own path.”

That legal odyssey seemed like an afterthought for the guy with blue-collar roots in suburban Chicago. His dad was a warehouse manager, his mother a teacher who, by choice, taught children in Chicago’s ghetto to read.

During the 1970s, Herman got a biology degree from St. Louis’ Washington University, then a University of Kansas master’s in biochemistry and molecular biology “on the road to med school,” or so it seemed.

Herman worked for a St. Louis company as a chemist sometimes relegated to quality control. He loathed the job and quit after little more than a year, figuring that “I wasn’t going to fit in anywhere” in corporate life.

“I’m essentially unemployable. I don’t take orders.”

He went on to study law at St. Louis University and cradled that vocation because “it honored creative thought, and the idea of getting paid to read and think appealed to me.”

Early plans to specialize in patent law gave way to “the beauty of constitutional law -- the clarity of thought, especially First Amendment issues. It’s a whole body of law devoted to the essence of freedom.”

A class one semester was devoted to free-speech issues, Herman says, “and I was hooked.”

A year after getting his law degree in 1982, the rookie lawyer was the advocate for a former TWA baggage handler -- a manic depressive -- who accused the airline of bias by not letting him picket outside Lambert Airport.

The TWA worker won, picketed a time or two, “and left a happy man,” Herman recalls.

The case didn’t get much fanfare, unlike those in the 1990s, when time and again Klan folks came calling for Herman. So did Mary Lewis and her pursuit of her “ARYAN-1” license plate that many deemed offensive, given that Adolf Hitler used “Aryan” to describe a superior race.

And then there was Hale, the World Church of the Creator’s white supremacist leader who earned a law degree and passed the bar exam, but was denied a license in 1999 by an Illinois panel that ruled him morally unfit.

Hale was offered legal backing by Alan Dershowitz, the famous Harvard law professor who -- as a Jew -- found Hale’s anti-Semitic views abhorrent but still constitutionally protected.

But when Dershowitz insisted that Hale sacrifice attorney-client confidentiality and let Dershowitz publicly attack Hale’s bigotry, Hale balked and turned to Herman, already well-known for his legal work on Klan matters.

“It’s unfortunate, really,” Hale said then, “but the sad fact is that most of the First Amendment lawyers are Jews.”

“He holds reprehensible views, but they screwed him,” Herman still maintains of those who kept Hale from practicing law. “You don’t have to agree or disagree with Hale to recognize that government has no business punishing people for their views.”

These days, Hale -- ringleader of a group that once included a man who went on a 1999 shooting rampage that killed two and wounded nine before he killed himself as police closed in -- is accused in Chicago of trying to arrange a federal judge’s murder.

Although Herman hasn’t forgotten Hale, a Klan kingpin fondly recalls Herman for “carrying the ball for us” -- no small word of thanks for a group long known for racist rhetoric.

“I don’t walk into a lawyer’s office and ask whether they’re Jewish or what country they’re from. I look for the best mind to do it,” said Thom Robb, national director of the Arkansas-based Knights of the KKK. “Absolutely, a lot of attorneys wouldn’t have taken up our cause. But Mr. Herman is a civil libertarian, and he’s taken that path. He says we have rights.”

Herman, Robb said, “has adequately fulfilled his obligation, not only to the First Amendment but to his attorney’s oath.”

Herman says he wouldn’t have it any other way.

“Why spend my days doing intersection collisions when I can adjust social and political situations?”