THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

LAW: THE TRUTH IS NO EXCUSE | nationalsalvation.net

I said in the article below that I am sure that the absolutely unique "loophole" by which I entered the University of South Carolina has since been closed.

That "loophole" was even unique in 1957. As I said, there was an article in TIME magazine about it. The loophole I refer to was the fact that, even if you had never been to school in your life, if you could prove that you knew more than three-quarters of the high school graduates taking the college entrance exam in the United States, you were automatically qualified to enter the University of South Carolina.

As TIME magazine made it clear, our USC was the only university in America that had that "loophole."

If you knew what you needed to know, only our USC in the all the land would let you go to college. Since then the University of South Carolina has integrated and gotten rid of all such provincial ideas.

Henry Clay is generally admitted to have been a terrific lawyer. Whatever you may say about Huey Long, his legal ability is not in question.

Henry Clay became a lawyer by passing the bar exam, and nothing else.

Huey Long studied for five months on his own and passed the legal exam.

My father, who became an engineer, studied and passed the legal exam just for fun.

Many law school graduates have to take that exam more than once. Some never pass it.

One lawyer I know moved from, I think it was, Oklahoma to Colorado. He got a good job in Colorado on the basis of twenty years of great success in the legal profession. But he ran into a problem that, while it may amuse you, did not amuse HIM.

In Oklahoma he had been allowed to go to law school with only two years of pre-law study in college.

In Wyoming you had to have three, and today you have to have full degree. In order to practice law in Colorado, he had to agree to go back to college for another year, and that was a special exception.

So now let us examine the word "education."

Nothing is made clearer than actual education has nothing to do with this process. The way I got into our USC is now banned as a "loophole" because I had an education but no degree.

My lawyer friend was a highly successful lawyer. He had long since demonstrated a complete legal education.

Henry Clay and Huey Long and even my father knew their law, but that was no excuse to let them practice law.

In 1986, in The Crown Versus Joseph Pearson, a British court sentenced Pearson to a year in prison because he had violated the Hate Law. The court freely admitted that every word Pearson had said was true. But, they said, "The truth is no excuse."

In Austria today, David Irving is facing a twenty-year sentence for saying that too few Jews died in the Holocaust.

He cannot defend himself by proving that his thesis is true.

The truth is no excuse.

So I went to college by proving that I was an educated man. People who can prove a terrific legal education are not legally educated.

The truth is no excuse.