BANZHAF’S GAME

It all might have ended there, except that a Washington-based law professor named John Banzhaf III happened to read the article. Within days, Banzhaf had filed a discrimination complaint against Mrs. Simpson’s with the city’s Department of Human Rights and Minority Business Development. The dance class, said Banzhaf, is “training future leaders of our society, so the impact of teaching them that discrimination against race and religion is okay is far more serious than a situation involving people who would not have important decision-making roles in society.”

A bewildered Mrs. Simpson hired a lawyer. Banzhaf countered with a press conference. Before long, the matter was settled: Though it continued to ” vigorously deny” charges of discrimination, Mrs. Simpson’s Dance Class was forced to accept an affirmative action program, complete with diversity goals, annual compliance statements, and an independent monitoring body composed of ” at least three African-Americans” to hurry along the inclusion process.

Two years later, Banzhaf remembers the event with apparent fondness. “We got a nice settlement from them,” he says. And how is Mrs. Simpson’s today? Inclusive? Diverse? A glorious patchwork of multihued boxsteppers? Banzhaf pauses, stumped. “It’s not one of those things I have followed up, so I couldn’t tell you.”

Not that it really matters. For John Banzhaf, whether or not a few more black kids learn the fox-trot was hardly the point of the exercise. The point was publicity — getting it, using it. And by that measure, hauling Mrs. Simpson before a human rights commission was time well spent.

In a city teeming with self-promoters, Banzhaf is the Edmund Hillary of publicity mongering. For 30 years, Banzhaf has been issuing statements, holding press conferences, relentlessly flogging the controversy du jour. Along the way, he has taken on dozens of Mrs. Simpsons — murderous corporations, sexist restaurants, greedy dry cleaners. But don’t be fooled. There is no ideology at work here. In John Banzhaf’s Crusade for a Better America, there is only one cause worth fighting for: seeing your name in print.

In his office on H Street, across from the law school where he teaches several days a week, Banzhaf reclines behind a desk cluttered with press clippings, videos of his television appearances, and copies of his resume, a four-page, 31-point list of “Major Professional Accomplishments.” Now in his mid-50s, Banzhaf is surrounded by photographs taken at various times during his long career. But this is no ordinary Wall of Ego, for the the pictures are almost exclusively of him alone. No grip-and-grins with senators or presidents. No family shots. Just Banzhaf, hands placed regally on a stack of legal briefs, or staring off in a dramatic warrior pose. Banzhaf becomes animated as he explains the difference between himself and his fellow George Washington University professors across the way. “I have called my colleagues myopic legal eunuchs for refusing to test their ideas where they can actually have value,” he says. “My colleagues will not go and testify on Capitol Hill. They’d rather write these long, introspective bullshit law review articles. Instead of writing law review articles, I will go out and bring legal actions.”

Banzhaf’s first legal action of note came in the late-1960s, when, as a young Columbia Law graduate, he used the FCC’s “fairness doctrine” to force television stations to run anti-smoking announcements along with their cigarette commercials. It was a heady victory for a 26-year-old son of a fireman from the Bronx. Though he admits he had no special grudge against smokers — smoking was “not even on my list” of concerns, he says — Banzhaf had tasted notoriety and found it ambrosial.

He promptly quit his job in Manhattan, moved to Washington and started Action on Smoking and Health, an anti-tobacco group. Soon, ASH was keeping him in the headlines with its intemperate press releases, which Banzhaf delivered by hand to local news agencies. “Two hundred years ago brave men and women pledged thei r lives, their fortunes and their sacred honors to win their freedom,” began a typical anti-cigarette missive from 1971. “What will you pledge to prevent the enslavement and death of millions of children, and to defend your right to breathe unpolluted air?”

(ASH was also paying the bills. By 1994, the non-profit group had an annual operating budget of more than $ 1.1 million, $ 261,000 of which went to management salaries. Banzhaf refuses to say how much he takes home, though he does concede the number “probably is” between $ 100,000 and $ 200,000.)

His reputation as a legal bomb-thrower established, Banzhaf joined the faculty at GWU’s National Law Center, where he began teaching a course called Legal Activism. (Banzhaf later boasted he had wanted to name it “Sue the Bastards” but was prevented by square university administrators.) Described in the school catalog as instruction in “legal judo” and “guerrilla law,” the course gave students academic credit for bringing legal action against people or establishments they believed were engaging in unfair practices. It also taught them how to handle the media, when to talk to reporters, how to hold a press conference. “We didn’t have a concept of public interest law as we have today,” he says. “Basically, I started that.”

The class soon developed a mystique on campus. The professor took to wearing a Superman T-shirt. His car sported a vanity plate that read, “SUE BAS.”

Together with his students — dubbed “Banzhaf’s Bandits” — Banzhaf began filing lawsuits and complaints against dozens of businesses in the city, mostly on grounds of discrimination. Barbers who billed more for women’s haircuts were charged with sexism. Rental-car companies that would not do business with drivers under the age of 25 got slapped with suits for ageism.

For Banzhaf, teaching was one more chance to increase his fame, to pass it on to future generations. “I’ve turned out more than 120 students, and they’re spread around,” he explained to Joe Goulden, author of The Superlawyers, in 1972. “One day something is going to bug each one of these guys, and he is going to remember what he did in law school. You get a couple of hundred lawyers doing this, and you are going to have a legal revolution in this country.”

The kids loved it. As one student explained to Washington Lawyer, “I really like this course because it allows you to act like a lawyer before you actually become one.”

Kirk Rankin, a former George Washington law student who took Banzhaf’s course in 1992, remembers the thrill of finding a suitable target for a lawsuit: “In the first class we sat around in this big bull session and figured out what ideas to pursue. And someone said, ‘What about this idea that there ought to be more johns for females at sporting events?’ Banzhaf just beamed. He said, ‘As far as I know, young lady, that’s my idea. I created the potty parity issue.’ He was just ecstatic. He was ready to fight for potty parity.” Rankin is now a personal-injury lawyer.

Banzhaf’s efforts didn’t stop at questions of toilet fairness. In the early 1980s, the professor and his students went after a number of Washington restaurants on the grounds that requiring men to wear jackets was discriminatory. (The rule did not apply to women.) At a press conference, Banzhaf warned other, not-yet-sued Washington restaurants “not to continue their [dress code] policy or you may be the defendants in the next lawsuit.” The case later was thrown out by a District Court judge, who described the action as “frivolous and trivial.”

Other suits were taken more seriously. In 1989, Banzhaf discovered that dry- cleaning businesses routinely charged more to wash women’s shirts than men’s. Although dry cleaners countered that women’s clothes were more expensive to wash, Banzhaf and his students pressed on, filing complaints against every laundry in Washington, most owned by immigrant Koreans. Ultimately, the businesses were forced to eat the losses and change their billing practices. ” It’s an unprecedented agreement to make Washington the first major city where there will not be any discrimination from dry cleaners regarding shirts,” he exulted. Before it was over, Banzhaf says today, the Korean dry cleaners’ association “went through three or four high-powered law firms” defending itself.

In 1993, still giddy from their war against dry cleaners, Banzhaf and three o f his students filed complaints against Washington night clubs that held “Ladie s’ Nights,” when women were given breaks on drinks or let in free on slow night s. Again, Banzhaf deemed the practice discriminatory. “You won’t see signs adve rtising Black Night or Wheelchair Night or Catholic Night,” he pointed out to t he Charleston Gazette, “but for some reason Ladies’ Night is OK.” A local w eekly that had dared run ads from bars with ladies’ nights also found itself hi t with a Banzhaf suit. The manager of one targeted nightclub seemed confused by the fuss. “This is our way of honoring” women, said the man, an African immigrant. “Maybe I need to learn more about sexism.”

When he wasn’t using his students to bully the locals, Banzhaf spent his time bullying them on his own. There were plenty of targets. “Every time I’m reading a newspaper,” he told the Washington City Paper, “every time I’m listening to a news broadcast, somewhere in the back of my mind there’s always a little thing saying, ‘Is there some way you could do something here? Is there some legal opportunity?'”

Indeed there was. When he found that the city’s all-male Cosmos Club was resisting a push to make it admit women, Banzhaf joined the fray, filing a discrimination complaint under the District’s Human Rights Act and forcing the organization to change its policy. When he read in a Washington Post column that Dulles airport did not provide baggage carts for passengers in its domestic terminal (the airport said it did not have space for a cart dispenser) , he filed a complaint under the Americans with Disabilities Act. He then sent out at least three press releases trumpeting his attack on the airport. And so on.

Meanwhile, Banzhaf’s fame grew, as he appeared on countless television shows to talk about the dangers of cigarette smoking and related topics. In one notorious incident, Banzhaf debated professor Ernest van den Haag on the CBS news program Nightwatch. When van den Haag lit a cigar to illustrate a point about smoking, Banzhaf tossed a glass of water on him, prompting an on- air melee. Later, in an appearance on the Morton Downey Show, Banzhaf bragged about assaulting the elderly van den Haag: “Mort, I threw water on him, and he didn’t have the guts to sue me.” It was no surprise when Banzhaf made $ IWashingtonian magazine’s list of 1993’s 25 Most Annoying People.

None of his grandstanding earned Banzhaf the affection of university administrators, a majority of whom voted to deny him tenure on his first attempt in the early-1970s. His persistent championing of unseemly causes on campus turned heads as well. Banzhaf, who takes a special interest in nudism and has done legal work in his spare time for a nudist colony in Maryland, wrote a number of opinion pieces for the student newspaper in which he defended pornography against the assaults of feminist and religious groups. Identified in his op-eds as “the director of the Foundation for Unrestricted Carnal Knowledge,” Banzhaf treated readers to an explanation of “the swinging philosophy,” as well as a detailed critique of stag films. “Most of the female stars of porno flicks are known and portrayed as women with lusty appetites and prodigious capacity to perform,” he wrote in one piece, arguing that X- rated movies do not degrade women. By contrast, “Virtually every prostitute can tell you about male customers who pay her to urinate and or defecate on them or who wish to be paddled or disciplined.” Don’t believe it? Doubters, advised Banzhaf, should “visit any of the city’s X-rated movie theaters or porno book stores and observe with an open mind.”

All this should have been an obvious tip to reporters that he was not an entirely legitimate source for news stories. In fact, the opposite seemed to be true: The more press releases Banzhaf sent out — a computer in his office is programmed with the fax numbers of 90 news organizations — the more fields in which he claimed expertise, the more his name ended up in print. Over the years, Banzhaf has made it into hundreds and hundreds of news stories, dozens of them in the New York Times alone.

Plug Banzhaf’s name into the Nexis electronic database and wisps of smoke begin to rise from the terminal — the system can barely cope with the enormity of the task. His name is everywhere: In the Memphis Commercial Appeal on Shannon Faulkner’s arrival at the Citadel; in the Detroit News on race-based congressional districts; in the Anchorage Daily News on the conduct of the FBI in the 1960s; in the Atlanta Journal and Constitution on Clinton’s latest Supreme Court nominee; in the San Diego Union-Tribune on the Reginald Denny beating trial; on the Gannett News Service wire on Paula Jones’s anti-Clinton accusations; in the Washington Times on government radiation experiments.

In 1992 alone, Banzhaf explained Iran-Contra to the St. Louis Post- Dispatch; weighed in on cult deprogramming in the Chicago Tribune; talked with the Gannett News Service about Ross Perot’s bid for president; held a news conference about protecting the homeless in Washington, D.C.; made his debut in Modern Brewery Age on the topic of alcohol poisoning; held forth on the House bank scandal in Roll Call; talked with USA Today about the Noriega trial; and appeared on Sonya Live to share his expertise on the subject of child custody cases.

In every appearance, from the Fresno Bee to the Dallas Morning News, Banzhaf played the expert, on subjects as varied as they are current: Waco. Okl ahoma City. Anita Hi ll. Ollie North. Marion Barry. William Kennedy Smith. In virtually each case, Banzhaf was contacted by reporters after issuing a press release offering his take as a freelance savant. Shortly after the verdict in the O. J. Simpson trial, for instance, Banzhaf sent out press releases touting his expertise on the subject of jury nullification. A number of papers responded. Banzhaf quickly found his name in the Virginian-Pilot, the Tampa Tribune, the Albany Times-Union, and the Post and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina, among others.

No news outlet has been more obliging to the publicity-hungry law professor than USA Today. Between 1990 and 1994, the paper referred to Banzhaf in an average of 11 different stories a year. On October 15, 1993, Banzhaf hit pay dirt, getting his name into two separate articles on two different subjects — the Reginald Denny trial and cigarette smoking. For the professor, the almost- hat trick was old hat — he’d done the same thing in the same paper four years before. (1989 was a good year for Banzhaf generally; he was quoted in 23 different stories in USA Today.) Much of USA Today’s comprehensive coverage of all things Banzhaf can be traced back to a single reporter named Sam Meddis. Between 1989 and the middle of 1992, Meddis quoted Banzhaf in 19 stories on at least seven different topics. “When you’re on deadline,” explains Meddis, you look for people who are “quotable” and who return phone calls. Those kind of people, Meddis says, “you call back again. You don’t do it consciously.”

All the media attention has been good for Banzhaf’s stock. Earlier this year, Al Gore and Donna Shalala invited him to debrief them on the subject of FDA regulation of tobacco. “I recognize that publicity is a very valuable tool,” says Banzhaf, reflecting on his success. “In many cases, the publicity is as important as the legal action itself. It means that when I make a threat, it’s more likely to be taken seriously.”

Kirk Rankin remembers his former professor lecturing the class frequently on the value of notoriety. “He said public interest law has its own rewards. The image he used, at least three or four times, was that getting your name and picture in the paper compensates for not having the big, plush corner office and the high-figure income,” Rankin recalls. “But he missed the point: If you’re not into publicity, who cares if you get your name in the paper all the time?”

True — if you’re not into publicity, that is.

By Tucker Carlson