Tales from Stasiland: Making the No-Fly List

By Scott Horton

Meet the latest addition to the Bush Administration's Enemies List: His name is Walter F. Murphy. He is the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence emeritus at Princeton University, and perhaps the nation's leading scholar working on the frontier turf between public law and political science. He's also a retired Marine Corps colonel, wounded in combat for his country and decorated for valor under fire.

Over at Balkinization, Mark Graber treats us to Prof. Murphy's first-hand account:

On 1 March 07, I was scheduled to fly on American Airlines to Newark, NJ, to attend an academic conference at Princeton University, designed to focus on my latest scholarly book, Constitutional Democracy, published by Johns Hopkins University Press this past Thanksgiving.

When I tried to use the curb-side check in at the Sunport, I was denied a boarding pass because I was on the Terrorist Watch list. I was instructed to go inside and talk to a clerk...

I presented my credentials from the Marine Corps to a very polite clerk for American Airlines. One of the two people to whom I talked asked a question and offered a frightening comment: “Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that.” I explained that I had not so marched but had, in September, 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the Web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the Constitution. “That'll do it,” the man said.

Murphy relates that he did eventually get a boarding pass and caught his flight. An attendant warned him: “they're going to ransack your luggage.” On the way back, his luggage was “lost.” Writes Murphy: “Airlines do lose a lot of luggage and this 'loss' could have been a mere coincidence. In light of previous events, however, I'm a tad skeptical.”