Hey guys, merry Christmas or merry belated Christmas because I know that was last week. How's everyone's Christmas? I'd love to hear about it. Share in the comments what you guys did. I basically spent Christmas with my family, which was really nice. It's great catching up with everybody. I also got a little bit burnt at one of our Christmas events as you guys can see for that after Sunspray came and really handy, which always happens at the beginning of summer for me. Just him to get a little bit pink.  But less than what? So now I'm going to be nice and pink for this video, so don't mind that. Also, I've had a shower tint while my hair just looks like Yeah, so we'll get straight into today's video. I've just gone and collected some lavender from my garden. We're coming to the end of the season, so we're going into summer, but there's not as many flowers growing. So I had to gather a few leaves just to kind of bulk it up a bit. But if you are doing this lavender tincture, it is recommended just to use the flowers. I'll be using some of the leaves as well. So yeah, it smells amazing. Every time I bring it into the house, I'm like, oh, it makes the house smell of lavender. It smells so good. Now, lavender tincture is just basically a concentrated like liquid or I guess herbal what would you call it? Herbal liquid, herbal remedy. Just as a concentrated level of the properties, like the beneficial properties, of whatever plants inside it. So if you use like dandelion, tincture, lavender, tincture, any other type of herb that you put into alcohol, it kind of draws out the properties and gives a concentrated level of the beneficial elements in that herb. So it's really good. Now, just keep in mind with lavender, like tincture, unlike dandelion, tincture, which you can take a little bit more of them. You don't want to overdose on lavender tincture because it can give like adverse effects and be quite toxic. Now, there are many uses for this lavender tincture that we'll be making. A few of them are, you can put a few drops in your oil diffuser at home to give off a lovely lavender scent, a bit like lavender essential oil, and it's great for helping you like to fall asleep too. Really relaxing, really calming. You can mix some of the tincture in with some coconut oil as like an after bath lotion to help you fall asleep as well. It's very soothing. You can use it in a linen spray to help scent like your bedsheets and things, again helping you to relax at night. You can use it as an extract in your favorite lip balm. So if you make the lip balm that I've made in the past, you can use some of this lavender tincture just to give it a lovely lavender fragrance or you can use lavender essential oil as well. You can add it into some homemade lemonade as an added flavor addition, giving it like a lavender lemonade kind of flavor. You can use it to scent bath water to help promote relaxation while you're in the bath. It can be effective in helping to combat against anti-fungal resistant infections. So you can use it on that. Again, it helps with healing wounds. It can help to promote hair growth. It can be used as a dandruff remedy to help with dry flaky skin. And you can also use it as an extract in baking to give it that lavender kind of taste and scent. It's really nice. But these are just a few of the many different things you can use lavender tincture for. Now, there are specific dosages for how much of it you can have. I know it's only very small. And this is by Dr. Will, I'm sorry if I pronounced that wrong. I found it online and his recommendations on dosages for lavender. It's to take two to four mil just for internal use of that lavender tincture just up to three times a day. For aromatherapy, you can add two to four drops of your lavender essential oil to two to three cups of boiling water. And this gives it a lovely fragrance in the room. For topical use, you can add one to four drops of this lavender tincture per tablespoon of olive oil and just avoid contact with eyes or like mucus membranes like your nose because it can actually irritate them. It causes them to sting. And yeah, so that's pretty much the recommendations that I found. So again, don't overdose on this lavender tincture because you don't want to receive any of the adverse effects with it. It can be very beneficial when taken in the correct dosage. So again, if you are taking it internally, just two to four mils of the lavender tincture up to three times a day. Maybe start off smaller and just see how you go if you work your way up just to see how you respond to it. There are like so many different benefits to taking lavender tincture and lavender in general, which I will share in my blog post down in the description. If you want to read into it and look up all the different effects, I probably won't go into it all today. Just will go straight into making it today. But if you are interested in wanting to learn more about it, feel free to check it out there. All right, let's get started. So I'm going to cut these up because I've left them a little bit big. I'm only making a tiny glass of it today. One because I don't have any of the flower buds and I'm only using a little bit of the leaves. I'll probably just brew the rest of the leaves up in a tea, a lavender tea later on. But for now, I'm just going to use it. There's a little jar also because I don't have as much alcohol left. I've been using it over many weeks to make many different things, one of which was my lavender oil.  So we're just going to make do with this tiny amount. Hence why I have this tiny jar. I don't need that much. So it just kind of works out perfectly because I don't have much alcohol and I don't have many flowers to use. Just worked out well. Great DIY today, I know. So the difference between tinctures and other extracts is that tinctures use alcohol as a solvent. Whereas other extracts may use things like alcohol, water, vinegar, glass ruin or other solvents like that. So tinctures are specific with alcohol and there are a few things you want to keep in mind with the alcohol when you're looking for it, which ones to buy. One thing to keep in mind is that alcohol proof does not equal percentage. So it does not mean that's how much alcohol percentage is in the drink. So they have a little guide here. So for example an 80 to 90 proof vodka equals about 40 to 50 percent alcohol which is like pre-standard and works well on making most tinctures. So that's a good one to go for. But side note you may need to mix vodka and 190 proof grain alcohol in equal parts for higher moisture items like lemon balm, berries and roots. This 190 proof grain alcohol is for things that are like more tricky or like highly bound essential oils. So that tends to be what you use it for. And it will not taste good at all so it's not recommended to use in tinctures. So just get that one in mind. You want to keep to more of the 80 to 90 proof alcohol. And again keep in mind that a little of the tincture goes a long way because it's a concentrated level of those beneficial properties from that herb. So really you only need a small amount. You may look and go this is like nothing. Trust me a little goes a long way. You don't want to overdose again. You don't want to have too much because it can be quite toxic. So really just starve small and just maybe work up to that limit. Otherwise just keep it to the basic level. Almost knocked my glass. That would be in the end of the tutorial. Alrighty now we'll get started making it. So once you have your lavender flowers you've got your alcohol and you've got your glass. You're pretty much that. So we'll get to it. To begin with chop and clean up the herbs to start with to help release essential oils and increase surface area. For fresh herbs fill the jar two-thirds to three-quarters of the way full. No need to pack it in. If using roots of some of the plant fill the jar with less about a quarter to halfway full. Or if using dried herbs just fill the jar halfway to three-quarters of the way full. Then pour the alcohol over the herbs in the jar. You want to make sure to cover the herbs within completely. For roots keep in mind that if you're using dried herbs they will increase in size as they soak up the liquid. So leave ample space. Once covered place the lid on the jar. Your jar should now be full but not jam packed. The herbs should be able to move around when gently agitated or swelled. Let the jar sit for two to six weeks gently shaking at most days if you're able. Different herbs require different lengths of time to sit in alcohol so it's important to do some research on the length of time required to sit in the alcohol if using various different herbs to make tinctures. Particularly if you're using it medicinally. Otherwise you might start extracting other components that are less desirable. A note forgot to mention sorry to break up the video all the way through. So I'm just going to leave it to sit for two to six weeks now. So first note if you're making a tincture you need to let it sit for two to six weeks to allow the properties to be drawn out through the alcohol. Next note which I totally forgot to mention as well is that I'm wearing my other vegan vibe shirt where it says too cute to spook. If the camera can focus on it hold on. Too cute to spook. Isn't that just cute? So that's the other shirt that I got from vegan vibe. The proceeds go towards different charities. I think this one was going towards um hold on let me double check. So the proceeds I'm pretty sure that go for this shirt and the other arctic shirt that I got as well which I showed in a different video. The proceeds from that go towards mercy for animals which helps to stop animal cruelty which is amazing. So it's really awesome to know that some of the money goes towards some charities like that. So if you are looking for a cool shirt to wear for halloween next year totally going to be wearing this one. Or you want to look at their cool different um styles and what's it called designs. I will share in the link below where I got these two shirts from. If you want to match like me. Weekend twin. Anyway we'll go back to the video now. So I'll see you guys in two to six weeks to see how the tincture goes. Pour your tincture jar contents through the filter. I just used a nut milk bag. And then squeeze the filter to get as much of the liquid out as possible. I just composted the herbs when I finished. The liquid should be coloured and no longer clear. Store the tincture in amber glass bottles to protect it from light. Or in a cool dark place of using clear glass bottles. Alcohol tinctures should last for years. Though if it looks funky don't use it. It can be a good idea to label what it is and when it was made just to be sure. This lavender tincture can be used in a whole variety of ways. It can be added to baths used as a light perfume. Just dab on the wrists to refresh sachets. As a liqueur or elixir in cooking and baking and more. You can add tinctures to a range of body care products too. So just soap, lotion, massage oil, toner and things like that. Just be sure to research the amounts recommended if you're using it medicinally. As you don't want to have too much. And that's it. There's your lavender tincture already to go. And that's how you make your own lavender tincture. I hope you guys enjoyed today's video. Do share with me what uses you use your lavender tincture for. Though it's internal or external like topical. Or if you're putting in a remover therapy as well. Or if you're putting in the other DIY's that you make. Feel free to share how you use it. If you have any other herbal tinctures that you've made that are really beneficial. Please share with me. I'd love to try them out too. I am looking at making a dandelion tincture in the near future. I have dandelions just outside that I'm going to collect and burrow up into a tincture as well. Which has so many different benefits that I've been bringing up. And I'll share with you guys that when I start making that. I will be going away over the next few weeks on holiday. So there won't be as many videos coming out. So it'll be a dry spell on my channel. Because I won't be filming anything. So it will be up to four weeks I think I'm going to be away. So I won't be having any videos coming up in that time. So I apologise for that in advance. I wasn't organised enough to get them pumped out before I left. That's alright. But just hopefully you guys will be even more excited to see them when I get back. I will have some really great videos to share with you guys. Sorry about that. I think the postman's here so I will go and get that package. That's alright. Emma's got it. I have a line of some really great videos I plan on filming really soon. I'm really excited to share these with you guys. So please stay tuned. I have some really great DIYs to be sharing with you guys. Otherwise, thank you so much for sticking out this whole video with me. I really hope you enjoyed it and I hope you got a lot out of it. Please share with me your biggest takeaways. And I hope to see you guys again in my future videos. Bye.


So we will see how land and soil interconnect and how all of that will interconnect with food, with water, with air, with fashion, and with our life, so to speak. Sadhguru, you embarked into a 100-day motorbike journey from London to India covering 30,000 kilometers across 25 nations. You are doing this as part of the Safe Soil Campaign calling on policymakers to make soil regeneration a priority. You are not young anymore. Embarking on such a journey is quite extraordinary. Sir Guru, can you first tell us about this campaign? What is the vision and what is the ambition behind the campaign? Namaskaram, Tev Ibrahim. Thank you very much for having us here and your support. And this has been your life's work in many ways. What I am seeing is there is so much happening in the world. There are so many concerned people, but still when it comes to concerted action, it is not one-pointed, it's many-pointed. I am not questioning the significance of other aspects, that is also significant. But soil is like the cream of the land or the cream of the planet itself. When I say cream, it takes certain amount of time for the cream to come up and the cream has come up over millions of years. And our life has come out of this cream, which is the topsoil. And that topsoil is in serious danger right now. We are running towards an extinction of this. What extinction of soil simply means is soil or the topsoil particularly is the largest living system, not just on this planet, but in this universe. In the known universe, there is no other material like this that can sprout life the way this topsoil sprouts. Whether you see a worm or an insect, bird, tree, animal, man, woman, everything has come out of this. But we have put this to great risk and danger right now. Yes, there are other concerns of rainforest, oceans and everything, but I think if we just stay out of it, they will be fine. They will all come back by themselves. But agricultural land is, you know, very connected with us, is entwined with our lifestyles and our living and our survival. This is a piece of land or this is a piece of geography that we call as agricultural lands in the world, where human hand is tending to it on a daily basis. If we can't turn this around, and that is in the worst possible condition, and if we can't turn this around, this shows we don't have enough commitment. So this is not a question of some great technology needed. This is not a question of enormous resources needed. This is just a question of direction and commitment. So I thought we should bring focus to this because as I spoke to various ministries, agriculture ministries across the world, what I discovered was most nations are still treating soil as an inert substance that you can manage by adding or discounting some chemical in it. Soil is the largest living system and first thing is this must come into human consciousness that we are dealing with life, we are not dealing with the material. Soil is not a resource, soil is the source of our life. If we do not rejuvenate that, if we do not enhance the power and the quality of that soil, the power and quality of our own lives will go down, the life of every other organism will go down. Why this urgency? You already accused me that I am not young enough for this. Yes, I am not. I shouldn't be doing this at this stage in my life. But I have been talking about this for nearly thirty years and people have a way of listening to it, appreciating it and sleeping on it. So I thought I need to do something shocking to wake them up a little bit and at least now they are concerned about my life. So in that, they will also be concerned about the soil. Why I am doing this is, see people in any given nation, nowhere in any given country have they ever spoken. 60% of the population have never spoken of their nations or their, or the planet or even the long-term well-being of their own children. They have not spoken. So in a democratic country, we have not elected governments to do something fantastic. We have elected governments to fulfill the mandate of the people. Where is the mandate from the people? So this movement is focused towards creating that 60% of the world's electorate to stand up and say, yes, we are concerned about soil. We are interested in long-term well-being of the planet and the future of our children because without these democratically elected governments cannot go ahead because their own term is four to five years. If they have to commit to an action which will take 15, 20 years to bear results, it needs people's mandate. We are trying to create, bring the people's mandate by moving three to four billion people on the planet. Fantastic. Well, really well said. When you said soil is not a resource, it's a source. It is a source. Soil has different names. Soil is food. Healthy land is clean water. Sustainable soil conservation is climate action. Biodiversity conservation, poverty reduction. Soil is fashion. Think about it when you buy a new t-shirt. Healthy soil sustains the economy. I guess that is the reason behind the campaign and the conscious planet movement that you have created, isn't it? So what do you say to the young girl or the young boy in the street about what their contribution specifically can be to conserve soil and to save the planet? See, Ibrahim, you're heading this agency, the UNCCD, which is combating desertification. I'm not here to tell you the horrific facts about soil to you. You're the man. But you can tell it to the people in the street. No, I will say it in a different way. Because I'm not a scientist. Let me say it in my way. This happened in 2016. A few scientists got an appointment with God. They went there and they told him, hey, old man, you've done pretty well with creation. But today everything that you can do, we can also do. It's time you retire. God said, oh, is that so? What is it that you can do?  The child became alive. God said, oh, that's very impressive. But first get your own soil. So it doesn't matter what, it doesn't matter what in your life you are using right now, what you see as living things around you, everything, from a tree to a plant to a worm to an insect, human beings, animals, your clothes, your food, the table, the furniture in which you sleep, just everything, everything in your life is from the soil. And there is no such material in the entire universe. This is not something that can be substituted. The only way is to keep the soil rich if you want the life rich. So it doesn't matter who you are, what you're doing, you must understand you're constantly dealing with soil, the very body that you carry is soil. Will you get this now? Or will you get this when we are buried? This is the only question. If we get it now, we can turn this around, we can make a huge difference. If we get it then, we still make good manure, but it's late. So are you saying that the young boy and the young lady in the street can do something about safe soil? Yes, they can do something. See, our school children in Tamil Nadu, when I spoke to our children, they said they are going to get 10 million children in India to write to the Prime Minister. So right now we have not reached 10 million, but few hundred thousands have happened. I'm sure Prime Minister's office will be inundated with children's messages. But once this happens in every country, no leader will be able to ignore it when he knows people are concerned about it. The most important thing is people have not spoken till now. So without getting them angry, it's very important, everybody says let's go, let's get the thing, the evil people who did this. I want everybody to understand this did not happen because of any evil design. This has happened in pursuit of human happiness and well-being. So that means every one of us are partners in this destruction and every one of us should become part of the solution. This is not about, this is not an agitation. This is not a protest. This is not an activism against any particular industry or lobby. I think all of us need to get together to turn this around because this is a problem of that size. If we want a solution, every one of us should be a part of it. Fantastic. Sadguru, you are expected to attend the 15th session of the conference of the parties to the UN Convention to combat desertification. This conference will be held in Abirjan, Kodifar in West Africa from 9th to 20th of May. World leaders, ministers, civil society organizations, experts, the world will rally to Abirjan by thousands to discuss the very important issue of land and soil. And we very much, we are looking forward to your participation to this conference. I believe Abirjan is one of the cities that you will be visiting. During that 100 days, what do you expect from a conference of the parties like this one in Abirjan and what do you hope to accomplish there? One thing I would request yourself and UNCCD as a whole to in some way get the focus more on top soil. The other concerns are there. I'm not saying you should give it up. But in terms of simple policy, we must bring the concern to this. This is what I would like to appeal to these 197 nations, including the European Union, which is an important part of setting an example. The important thing is this, that there must be an incentive for a farmer to raise the organic content. Right now there are various products which are considered organic. What are the other products? They are definitely not inorganic. We know that. So if we change the label itself, that it is a certain percentage of organic content, for example, right now, Northern Europe has 1.48%. If Northern Europe offers this incentive to the farmer, if you raise it to 3% organic content, it's very easy to test the organic content of the soil. It can be done on the field. You don't need a lab to do that. So if that is done, this product, by converting the land into 3% organic, 3% is not the best thing. 3% is starvation diet for the microbial life. But at least let that much happen because at least they stay alive. Below that, they're dying and desertification is happening means microbial life is being starved to death. That's what it means. So at least keep them alive and as it raises, you label the product according to its organic content. In the meanwhile, the businesses and industry can jump in and see that the farmer gets the carbon credit. It's very important we enhance the renumerative aspect of farming. Otherwise nobody will be farming in another 25-30 years time. We have seen in India out of 63% of the population which is in farming, not even 2% want their children to go into farming. This is a disastrous future we are looking at because this magic of turning mud into food is not a simple thing. It's a very complex thing, but the knowledge is intrinsic. So people are not valuing it. Most educated people cannot grow a crop. They cannot do it. It is not in their capability to do that. So another thing is the product will find different ladders in the marketplace. 3%, 4%, 5% because we have enough science to tell you that if the organic content in the soil is 3%, what are the extra micronutrients which are present in that food and what are the health benefits, what are the preventive health benefits. All this is well established. We just need to collate this and establish a roadmap that the whole world moves towards a minimum 3-6% organic content in the next 8-12 years time. It is very much doable because just if you bring cover crops in summers or winters according to the nature of one's climate, just the cover crop and plough it back into the land, if you do this within 6-8 years most lands will reach 3% minimum. So it is not not doable, nor does it take enormous amount of money. It is only a question of single pointed direction and commitment. What we have seen in India is to put cover crops, if government has to give subsidy for the seeds to be thrown into the soil out of which you are not taking any crop, it is just being used as humus. If you have to do that, it just costs 450 rupees per acre which is just 5 euros or less than 5 euros per acre. Every nation can do this. It does not need heavy budgets. If you want to do it within 2-3 years time it will cost little more money but if you want to do it in 6-8 years time every nation can do it. This is not happening only because of lack of single or direction and commitment. That's what I would like to bring to the COP 15 in Ivory Coast that these 197 nations, if they look at it this way that a single or focused towards top soil and a commitment towards that this doesn't take money this doesn't take any great technology every nation poor or rich can do it and it should be done. If you are interested in the future of this world and the future generations UNFAO goes about to say the food that we are eating right now belongs to the unborn child. Eating up the food of the unborn child hurts me deep in my heart. It feels like we are committing a crime against humanity itself. Well, thank you very much, thank you to all listeners and viewers millions from around the world follow you and we hope that they will do more than just following you in your videos they will follow you with actions and we would like to call all people in the world to actually take care of this very important natural capital because it is life it is our food, it is our air it is the quality of the water it is the quality of our health and it is the quality of the food the nutritious food that we all need. So I would like to thank you all very much for your participation, thank you Sadhguru for your tour and thank you once again my appeal to every one of you that all you have to do is these hundred days talk about soil every day something. Please research by yourself or savesoil.org is there otherwise UNFAO, World Food Program, UNCCD, many conventions they have their website, there's a whole lot of information take something make it your own and talk about soil for these hundred days in a concerted way the world talking about soil and shifting the narrative towards soil is very vitally important right now. This is once in a will we be that of disaster or will we be that generation which was sleeping through the thing and landed up in the disaster and later on we will grieve about it this is not a disaster we can allow to happen we can mitigate this and this is both a challenge and a privilege for our generation that we are in this cusp of time that we can turn it around but if this is attempted after thirty or forty years time this will be extraordinarily difficult and most probably we will not be able to do it this is just the time this is our time let's make this happen thank you very much let's make it happen thank you are we done? ok well


My name is Rachel Seneschal, I'm the Program and Development Coordinator here at the Library and I've been very pleased to work with the League of Women Voters, Sue Racconelli, who is here tonight and Kate Boehrer, who couldn't be here tonight because of a family, a deaf man family and we're very excited about that and this series has been on the First Amendment and it's been a great series and we've had really wonderful people here to talk about various issues about the different First Amendments and I want to thank Sue for helping to organize this and every other program in the series and Sue will in turn introduce tonight's moderator who will in turn introduce tonight's presenters. So please help me welcome Sue Racconelli. Thank you Rachel. As many of you know the League of Women Voters is a nonpartisan organization. We were founded in 1920 and will proudly be celebrating our 100th year in 2020. We are delighted you could join us this evening to hear our program on freedom to petition the government for a redress of grievances. This is the final presentation in our series on the First Amendment. It is my pleasure to welcome Kerry Brown, who will be our moderator this evening. Kerry is Executive Director of the Vermont Commission on Women. She worked in the field of gender equity in Vermont since the mid 1990s, including the Vermont Technical College and Vermont Works for Women. Her early days were spent as an educator and she has a master's degree in public administration. Kerry lives in Montpelier with her family where she is a justice of the peace. Kerry will take over and introduce us to the panel. Thank you. Thank you everyone. Thank you all for coming out tonight to hear about the Constitution. There is no better topic than we can be talking about than the Constitution. What is more important than this? I am very pleased to be here. The Vermont Commission on Women is a state agency. We work to increase opportunities and reduce discrimination for women and girls across Vermont. And so fundamental rights are at the heart of what we do. And I am very excited to be here partly because when I was a kid my hope was to grow up to be a Supreme Court justice one day. And I think this might be the closest I've gotten so far. Thank you for this opportunity. So tonight we're going to have, each of our panelists will have about 15 minutes to talk about different aspects of this particular part of the First Amendment. And then after that we'll have time for questions and discussion. So I will introduce everybody right now so you know who's up here. And then we'll go one by one and they'll take their turns talking about their particular topics. So we have, our first speaker will be Professor Peter Tichaut. He's a professor at Vermont Law School. He's recognized for his expertise regarding the constitutional and history of Vermont and the United States. Professor Tichaut received his bachelor's degree from Amherst College, his JD degree from Harvard Law School, and a master's degree from the University of Sussex. He joined Vermont Law School faculty in 1975. His expertise has been frequently tapped by Vermont's legislature and judiciary which has sought his testimony and advised on the balanced budget amendment, flag desecration legislation, the redrafting of the state constitution in gender neutral language for which I have to say the Vermont Commission on Women is very thankful. The Education Financing and Civil Union legislation. And he will, well I'll tell you a little bit more about what he's going to say. Our second panelist is Paul Gillies who works for Terant Gillies and Richardson and he's been there since January of 1993 and he joined that firm after 12 years as Deputy Secretary of State for Vermont. His practice involves most of the usual civil areas of law including municipal zoning and land use, property appellate and trial work. He has a special fascination for old roads, boundary lines, rights of way and other easements and that special land where history collides with law which I think is going to be quite appropriate tonight. And then our third panelist is John Franco. John Franco is a native of Vermont. He has more than 35 years experience in public service. 40. 40, more than 40? No, 40. Exactly 40 years experience in public service. His private law practice is dedicated to serving the needs of working Vermonters and small business. So we are going to start with Professor Teachout who's going to give us a little bit of a historical context for tonight. So I am going to ask you to address a few broad issues here. We want to hear about the origins of the right to petition in the Anglo-American constitutional tradition. We want to hear a little bit about the relationship that this right to petition has to other rights such as speech, press, assembly that are addressed in the First Amendment. And a little bit about kind of the historical progression of our thoughts about those rights and how they came to be. Thank you, Kerry. Can you hear me okay? Well, I would be remiss in beginning without first of all thanking all of you for taking the time to show up this evening. It's not the most exciting right in the First Amendment, but it is a very important one as we shall come to see and equally important as I think we will stress in our presentation tonight is a parallel provision in the Vermont Constitution, which my colleague Paul Gillies will talk about in much more detail. I'd also be remiss if I did not share with you the special resonance that this library has for me. When I was a little kid going to kindergarten and first grade in the Union School, this library was on my route home. I had to walk through the State House and then up Clarendon Avenue. I think some of you know where that is. And on my way home, after school, I would stop in what was then the Children's Library, which was downstairs at that point in time. And I would sit on the floor consumed by books even before I knew how to read. And as I got a little bit older, I read every single book in this library about boys. George Washington, boy statesman. John Paul Jones, boy mirror. John Marshall, boy adventurer. Alexander Hamilton, boy stockbroker. Anyway, if there's, when I come here, I think I can't think of any other place in my whole life that in some ways probably had a more powerful shaping influence on my education, on who I've become, for whatever it's worth. But it's just a tremendously nice residence. I think probably some of you remember the libraries that occupied you and engaged you when you were small children as well. So I want to begin tonight by sharing with you a paradox of sort of all of the rights that are mentioned in the First Amendment, free exercise, non-establishment, right to free speech, freedom of press, right of assembly. The one right that has the most ancient and venerable heritage is the right to petition. I will explain why. The paradox is that today of all of those rights, in some ways the right to petition has become the least significant now. When I say least significant, I don't want to imply not significant. I'm just saying if you read the books, you read the cases, you'll find it's one of the least litigated and one of the least significant provisions in the First Amendment. So how can that be? The most venerable, the most ancient right of all those mentioned in the First Amendment, but yet today, in some ways, the least significant. So that's what I'd like to basically trace with you in my introductory remarks this evening. And I want to begin by carrying us all the way back to the origins of the right to petition. I'm sure we can go back further, but one of the major moments in Anglo-American history was the meeting of the lords with the king at Runamid Meadows in 1215 at the time of the signing of the Magna Carta. One of the main purposes of that meeting and those negotiations between the king and his knights was over the right to petition. Among the grievances that the lords had, I'll give you just one example. At that time it was a practice of the king when a knight died, a knight that owed him fealty died. If he was married, the king would take his property and either give it or sell it to somebody else leaving his widow penniless. And one of the things that was negotiated at Runamid Meadows, that doesn't seem right, that's a grievance. And it was one of the terms of the agreement that was worked out at that time. If we move fast forward to our own colonial history, by the way, I've handed out two sheets and if you want to track very roughly my comments you'll find on the first sheet and you'll find at the top both the language of the First Amendment and also the language of Article 20 of Chapter 1 of the Vermont Constitution which contains a parallel provision in the Vermont Constitution. So my comments from this point forward will be sort of tracking that very crude outline at the bottom of that same page. So I've mentioned the Magna Carta. Fast forward to the colonial period. One of the most influential books for lawyers and for citizens generally in the colonies during the 1760s was a work by William Blackstone called Commentaries on the Law of England. At that point in time the colonies followed English law. They had no, they had some independent law of their own but the dominant source of law was English law. And this is before the Declaration of Independence. If you read Blackstone Commentaries you will find this. The right of petitioning the king or either House of Parliament for the redress of grievances is quote, a right appertaining to every individual. That was a fundamental right. If you read the Declaration of Independence you will find that one of the major grievances of the colonists was the lack of response of the king and parliament to petitions for redress of grievances by the colonists. I will quote from the Declaration. In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms. Our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. Nice way of putting things down. A prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant is unfit to be the ruler of our free people. You see the centrality of this notion of a right to petition and a right to get at least a response to petitions in which that requested redress of grievances. So what happens after that? How can we explain then that today the right to petition does not hold a great as much significance as any of the other rights in the First Amendment? Well, one of the things that's really interesting is during the period following the Declaration of Independence every state at that point had to somehow rip up the old colonial charters and adopt for the first time in Anglo-American history written constitution. These are the very first constitutions in our experience and most of those constitutions had two components. One was a declaration of rights and the other was called a frame of government which talked about legislature, executive body, and so on and so forth. If you look at those early state constitutions it's pretty significant that all of them by that time included a strong statement about the importance of freedom of the press. Freedom of the press during the time of the Revolutionary period was thought of as the great bulwark of liberty. But only one of those state constitutions, Pennsylvania, had a provision protecting freedom of speech. So this is kind of an incubation period in which these grievances, notions of rights of English persons are beginning to appear in state constitutions but at that point in time you have the right to petition and the right of free speech, perhaps a right of assembly but except for one state, Pennsylvania, no right of freedom of speech. There was a republic during that time called the Republic of Vermont and the Republic of Vermont, the first constitution, did protect the right of free speech but it was an anomaly in that sense. So during the next decade between declaration and adoption of the constitution and then adoption of the Bill of Rights in 1791 we begin to see this understanding of the whole group of rights coming into focus, they become crystallized. And what they reflect interestingly is a radical transformation in political thought between say the mid 1600s when Parliament and the King are having it out in England and the mid 1700s. And what's the nature of that transformation because it's absolutely crucial to understanding this whole development. If you look at my little outline this is going to be a little bit simplistic but it actually is accurate. During the mid 1600s the basic conception of political organization was one, a hierarchical one, there was a king up there and down below were his subjects, right? By the mid 1700s in part due to a whole number of factors including the experience in the American colonies that relationship is totally reversed. By the time these state constitutions are being written you'll find exactly the opposite understanding of the relationship of the people to government authorities. And I've included on the other handout I don't know if I've kept a copy we don't have any extra. A section that you will find in virtually every state constitution during this time it seems like such a cliche to us so ordinary that would say how could that possibly be revolutionary? But I will tell you at this point in time it was a kind of revolutionary statement and the statement was a very simple one it's called trustees and service that all power being originally inherent in and consequently derived from the people therefore all officers of government whether legislative or executive are their trustees and servants and at all times in a legal way accountable to them. So you see an absolute flip-flop of the relationship between rulers and people in that hundred years span and that is reflected in the Vermont constitution and in the federal constitution in a myriad of different ways a requirement that government be open to examination free speech, freedom of the press there are also reflections of that same the underlying that all is a notion that government officials are accountable and need to be held accountable to the people so what happens to the good old right to petition during this time? It gradually loses a kind of significance it once had when it was the sole basis for challenging government actions now suddenly we see the right of freedom of the press rising to the top free speech rising to the top a judicially created right of association that is related to the right of free speech and freedom of the press and so these rights then become the primary ways in which all of us can then express our challenges our grievances and so on by themselves without needing to resort to the right to petition which at one point in time was the sole way of doing so so I want to close then by well let me make one further point I don't know if any of you studied law the constitutional textbook that I use today is 1800 pages long okay it is that fat if you look at that textbook you will not find a single case a single major federal constitutional case involving the right to petition if you look through the index of that 1800 page casebook you will not find the right to petition even mentioned okay so something has happened and as I've tried to suggest its relevance and significance generally speaking has diminished as these other rights have come to sort of take over and do the work that the right to petition had to do all by itself in a much earlier period finally if you'll take a look at me hand out with the language of the First Amendment and the language of the Parallel Provision in the Vermont Constitution you'll notice that there are certain parallels but you'll also notice there are certain differences and differences that I think Paul Gillies will tell us are extremely important so let's, we know what the First Amendment provides let's just take a moment to read Article 20 of the Vermont Constitution we borrowed this or stole it from the Pennsylvania Constitution the way we stole most of the other provisions in the First Vermont Constitution word for word but there it is that the people have a right to assemble together to consult for their common good to instruct their representatives and to apply to the legislature for redress of grievances by address, petition or remand spirits which the difference, is there any significance difference that flows from the different language in the federal constitutional provision and the state provision I will now turn the floor over to Paul Gillies to tell you a very interesting story why you ready? I feel like I'm in the law school I'm sorry let me just get a little bit into it before we start there in my experience I was a selectman in Berlin, a chair for three years I was JP for eight years I was deputy secretary for 12 years and all that time one message became clear to me which is that government that ignores what the people want is in trouble and it causes problems not only the loyalty of the citizens but also the respect for the government and a sense of separateness that keeps us from each other and this right to petition this right to bring your concerns to the government to see if you can have a response is in my mind so critical to the continuance of good government that government ought to be able to respond government like anyone is offended when you oppose it to criticize it and there are systems that are designed so that we don't get the kind of constructive dialogue that we should have Sam Frank Bryan professor at UVM smartly said that there's a significant difference between a public hearing and a town meeting because at a town meeting you have control and at a hearing you get to say what you have to say and then there's no necessary reaction to the dialogue Peter's explanation of the federal constitutional matter is very clear to those of us who are now waging a battle in South Burlington and it may seem like a quotidian matter but to 800 or 900 former graduates of South Burlington High School and rebels made sense the guys that got their letter jackets that said rebels all of a sudden it became politically incorrect because it sounded as though it was racist and the school board decided to change it to unfortunately they chose to change it to wolves which probably has some of the problems of itself and the people rose up and petitioned them to have a vote on a non-binding referendum a non-binding article that would say how do you think would you like to have the name changed or not and the background of this is that the issue had been broiling for years the school board had actually taken a position not to change it and then without proper notice they changed it one night the next school budget which included the next language to change which was something like $180,000 to change the signs and all the stuff that goes with it failed the second budget had that as well it failed the third time they took it out and it passed but they made no change to do that so we went to court and we went to the superior court where we had now stepping back they have a long history 30 or 40 years in Vermont of court saying no to petitioners and a lot of times it was justified because sometimes they wanted to change the person that did the public accounts sometimes they what thought why don't we pick three of us from the people and we'll replace the listeners so we got a fair grand list you can imagine how grand this would have been could I ask a question just to clarify sure is it a school board warrant or is it a town board it's a school board district warning that they hoped to have a special election or an annual meeting where they would have a vote on this question they had to supply it with 5% signatures of the voters and it was repudiated and it was justified by saying that it was only within the discretion of the school board as to what kind of articles of non-binding nature would be placed before the voters and that was the ruling of the Supreme Court in a case heard several years before which I was also involved in where they declared incidentally from South Burlington itself that a lady who had circulated a petition had got 5% of the voters who wanted to have a question as to whether there was support in the city for a early notification of childhood abortion necessarily a right-wing issue but all she wanted to do was to put it before them the court said no the Supreme Court said absolutely no but they said that the city council could put something on if they wanted and South Burlington had a long history of nuclear freeze of South America and a lot of issues over time political issues and this city has had many times where you've had political issues there but the ultimate ruling at this juncture was that the city council or the select court could decide it so we're two weeks away from the moral argument the briefs have been submitted and we are focusing not on the statute which had been declared in declared different from what it seemed to say which is you could put a non-binding article in the warning and we have turned to article 20 of the Vermont Constitution which as Peter has said has it has no history in Vermont and the First Amendment doesn't have any history in the country so we're going to get the history and there's an analysis we'll go through and the interesting part of this is that article 20 there is some use in Vermont there was a long history until the 1800 of people petitioning the legislature for declare me so I don't get sued by my creditors or let me get out of jail or even as Omerus says give me a new trial or allow a piece of evidence to be admitted that a court has kept out and the Supreme Court by 1826 declared that as an unconstitutional matter and petitions then slowed down and stopped what the people in South Burlington wanted to do was to have an opportunity to just express their opinion they did not expect that they would make the decision to change that rule as the judge mellow said in his decision in the superior court the this is an enforceable and a non-binding article is enforceable at the next election day if you feel strongly enough that people didn't respond you had expressed as an opinion then you should be able to take them out but there's no mandamus or no action which would force the school board in South Burlington to change their mind on the expression of that so we have an important decision coming up in the Supreme Court previously all the decisions that have come before have been generally discouraging to people from the petitioning side I'll go back to my central point which is that government needs to breathe it needs to be a dialogue we can't have the king in the form of boards lording over the servants which are the voters to whom they answer so we have a situation where we have a chance to change things by looking at the constitution and the constitution is sort of a blank slate one of the issues that has come out which has been briefed and argued over and over will no doubt come out in the oral argument is whether the word representatives in article 4 is capitalized or not and those who say that the school board is right say that capital are representatives means people that serve in the legislature has no relationship to the to town me don't you just love it now I went through every published version of the Vermont Constitution including the first one that Ira Allen arranged to have published in Connecticut so we could have a government and there is no consistency the first I appreciate this 1777 and 1786 lower case are 1793 capital are and in the since 1880 capital are so what are we going to do with that I'm using up my time it's time to go to John and I don't know that I answered Peter's question but I managed to avoid them usually impossible so maybe I do the same now well I would just like you to consult article 20 and just notice that there in fact are two provisions in article 20 one is a right to petition the legislature for redress of grievances there's the second provision on which Paul's case rest which is the right to instruct their representatives so it's kind of interesting we're talking about the right to position there's a unique provision in the Vermont Constitution which gives the people a right to instruct their representatives thank you thanks John Franco again I do a lot of frankly a lot of constitutional law two cases on the stove in any given year that are either civil rights or constitutional issues and I'm sort of a practitioner in this stuff and maybe later this evening we can talk about some of my frustrated, grumpy old man views about how these rights are treated by the courts you know first I want to comment about Paul's case when I first heard about the decision in red my first reaction was Paul and Judge Mellor were out of their cotton pickin' lines what were they thinking of here and the reason for that is I got burned in this case myself once way way way back there's a case called Royalton Taxpayer Association versus Wassertendorf and the reason I remember Royalton Taxpayer Association is because I was going a lot of Vermont law so we're getting constitutional law from this guy in self-roiling and that said no no no it's the power of the select board to do what you're asking to do and the term was nougatory or nugatory I love that word well it's different about Paul's case they said well wait a minute you're instructing you have the right to instruct the school board about how you feel and something that they have authority to do something about and this had to do with the changing of the name from rebels to wolves and the other thing I'll tell you is I wasn't terribly enthralled politically with or something that had politically with the plaintiffs in the case but when I read it the second time I said this is interesting and then the third time I read it frankly Paul said this is brilliant and I think it's a really and I think it's a really important president in the state of Vermont and let me follow up on that that had significant and immediate repercussions in the city of Burlington because there has been an ongoing controversy about the location of the F-35 fighters of the Burlington airport and a number of enterprising opponents circulated petitions and 5% of the voters in Burlington is a lot because the voter was so inflated with all the students that registered for Barack Obama then left and they never really kept their roles up so when they got a petition of 5% of the voters to have the town meeting to consider a question of whether or not basically whether the F-35 should be cited in the city of Burlington or whether the city council should do something I forgot exactly what it was as keep in mind that the airport in South Burlington is an apartment of the city of Burlington so it was within the city council's jurisdiction which was important about Paul's case now what happened with that and what's significant politically was there was an effort by people that opposed that petition in support of the F-35 they were saying this petition is not it's biased and it's slanted in its wording and the city council should change it and rewrite it and that did that effort was not successful because the majority of the city council was persuaded based upon Paul's case that they had to take the petition as it was circulated inside if you start, you as the city council start amending it you're not honoring their right to instruct their representatives I think very significant, the other kind of general point I want to make and then we can open it up to some discussion I couldn't agree more with Peter about what happened to the right to petition I recently have involved in litigation right now in federal court which involved what we thought was a denial my clients do process rights to be heard to take an appeal through the zoning processes that are provided by the planning act and one of the things I looked at because the right to petition is not just legislative the right to petition is recognized as also a first amendment right looking at the case law of that what it provides you I mean nothing, I just abandoned it I just said this isn't worth pursuing what you have to do is you have to show you have a property right now right was denied the denial of notice and the process and so forth and so on the thing about the right to petition it would have been a much more expansive argument and I wouldn't have to you know wouldn't have to make the proof or show them what's called a property right whatever that means so I think it has fallen by the wayside at least directly maybe in the discussion a little later we can talk about how it still exists sort of underground in various formats particularly in public document cases which I think are very significant I think it's very closely related to that so maybe we can open it up for discussion so you guys can keep going thank you so much you know one of the things that I'm really struck by in listening to all this and in reading ahead of time this has this is a right that we don't really talk about most of us don't hear much about it we don't, it sounds like it's not really used very much but it really goes to the absolute heart of democracy that this is really at the the fundamental level of what it means for the people to be in charge and so I'm very encouraged to hear about the progress that you're making and the ways that we have to use this right and it makes sense when you talk about the historical context that it's not, that it's sort of faded away I can see why that happened but it's still there right, it didn't actually go away, it's still there and so we still have that to draw on so I would love to have an opportunity for folks in the audience if you have some questions can I ask if we can continue this discussion does anyone have anything they want to ask about or say yeah I'm kind of curious in that obviously a lot of these things were thought about and included in like Vermont Constitution prior to the federal constitution being drafted and I'm wondering how come more of these rights were incorporated in the original Constitution in the original Vermont Constitution not in the original federal constitution well the small question when the constitution emerged from the Philadelphia convention in the summer of 1787 and went out on the circuit to state ratifying conventions one of the major objections to the proposed new constitution, very powerful argument that it contained no Bill of Rights Massachusetts, two vote difference changed the outcome New York one vote difference at the ratifying convention and one of the most powerful arguments was if the federal constitution didn't contain a Bill of Rights the primary argument was that states already protected Bill of Rights in their state constitutions so it was unnecessary since this is talking about simply the creation of the federal government with very limited powers it didn't finally work and one of the deals that was made was an agreement that if the proposed new constitution were to be ratified the very first thing that would happen would be a proposed set of rights a declaration of rights would go out to the people in the various states and those since have become the first ten amendments including the first amendment which contains all the rights that we know it does that's not a terrible adequate answer but that's the best answer I can give you a very controversial issue it strikes me that the other freedoms are very intuitive freedom of religion freedom of speech you know where there's a transgression or you can envision the case but the case of freedom to petition seems like it sets up a stage for death by a thousand cuts what is the process and can you give an example of a petition that was made and how it came about let me answer it by looking at the state of Vermont's experience with referendum we have had 30 instances in the course of our history where the legislature has given the voters an opportunity to give their opinion about legislation it's been very carefully drawn that it does not give the voters the right to adopt it or to enforce, to ensure its passage merely to inform the legislature as to what was about we did that with uh horse racing mutual horse racing we did it with early on we did it with whether we should have legal, except as legal tender of goods and meat and potatoes in place in Green Mountain Parkway we just celebrated the centennial of the Vermont Supreme Court building which was a subject of a referendum in 1914 and they asked the voters the way it was written was this building would be constructed at a cost of $300,000 and it was very clear that if you voted no and should that act take effect on July 1st, 1915 and if you vote no it'll take effect on July 1st, 1960 but it was it was effective because $300,000 was too much for the legislature to expect that they could spend given that the vote went against the $150,000 the $300,000 vote so they came back and voted a building for $150,000 showing our conservative qualities but the process is the government presenting an issue to the people it's not the people presenting an issue to the government I'm not seeing where an individual or a group of individuals find a pathway to petitioning the government about a surge let me give you two examples one of the examples is the case of the federal whistleblower who says I've got a grievance the part of the federal government that I work for is cutting corners they're not complying with the law and so on the problem, you're perfectly free to petition for repressive bad grievance then you get fired the next day so retaliation against whistleblowers is one of the few areas where you see this right to petition still maybe has a little bit of purchase another area which I've one of my students worked on out in I think it was Wisconsin the city council was very much in favor of expanding a local nuclear power plant and he represented an environmental group that was opposed to it now the city employees were allowed to sign a petition supporting the expansion of the nuclear power plant and he said that's not right because they're denying my environmental organization the right to use the same channels to see if we can get people to sign a petition opposed to the expansion it's interesting the way that's handled today is through freedom of speech viewpoint based discrimination not permitted if you create a forum for one group you have to provide the same forum for another but it's not treated technically under the right to petition so it's interesting the way that issue that once would have been a right to petition issue has now become a free speech issue I was mentioned before where I see that the kind of the subterranean issues but right to petition and one of them is let me give you a tour as one of them is the Public Documents Act in order for people to effectively petition the government they have to be able to find out what's going on and that is stated in the Public Documents Act the purpose of it it's actually under the section of the statute that says common rights for monitors and I've done a little bit of public document litigation but I'll tell you what I find a part of it is because the statute is just so long and opaque it's hard to really sort stuff out but the general reflex of government in Vermont is to deny the public document request and require the person requesting it to go first through the administrative appeal and then to the spirit court and then to the supreme court to get the public document and by the time you get there it's like staleer than stale and then the other problem that we have is even though we're supposed to get if you're a citizens group and you're hired you're supposed to be able to get a fee shift for that which means that the government loses they pay your legal fees but the Vermont supreme court as often as not will deny the fees for that so what kind of right is it for public access to documents is that at the end of the day you've got to spend a lot of money to get the documents get them on a stale basis and then be denied your right of the statute to to get reimbursed by the government for your efforts to make the government comply with the law the other area that really I've run up against a couple of times in constitutional cases is how the courts wield you mentioned depth by thousand cuts they wield things that are called standing requirements standing requirements are requirements that if you want to oppose something you want to oppose a piece of legislation you want to oppose an ordinance you've got to show that you have standing and standing means that you have to show that you're injured and something that you can bring a redress of grievances and I've been involved in a couple of cases where I think both Superior Courts and the Vermont Supreme Court very unfairly denied kick the case out on the standing issue and I got to tell you that I actually came across one federal case that said if anybody tells you there's any coherence or consistency in standing jurisprudence they're absolutely lying to you it depends on whether or not they like your case or not it depends on whether or not they want to throw you out and I got to tell you that is absolutely the God's honest truth I had a case a couple of years ago in Burlington one of the plaintiffs with Jared Carter who's a professor at the law school with Professor Keech out we had very good arguments for standing in that case established arguments and standing in the way that the Supreme Court dealt with them and they just ignored them and said basically we don't like a petition you don't have standing one area where we should have had standing is Vermont traditionally allowed it's called a taxpayer stand taxpayer standing meant that a group of taxpayers could come in and bring a petition against municipal government on the theory that they're really you know they're screwing up and they're costing us more money than we really should have to be paying and then we have to pay for it and up until very recently that right by the way it was an analogy to what you see in corporate law in corporate law there's what's called the derivative actions to shareholders to bring it so it'll be half of all the other shareholders to say management's screwing up you're violating your fiduciary duties you're costing us money so that was sort of the municipal corporation analogy to that but what's happened in the last I don't know 5, 10, 15 years and it's symptomatic of what I see happening in legal practice all over the place is we're now seeing that right of taxpayer actions being passed well you know Mr. Jones didn't show that he or she really you know we're going to get going to get injured financially or not injured a lot or blah blah blah blah blah and that was one of the things that our case umbrella thing got thrown out on but then in another case they allowed it and if you want to you were looking for a cohered ration out for that you can't it's just totally result oriented so those are the little things by which the right of petition agreements are denied and again you have to understand that the right of petition again it's not just with the legislature I would say the bigger component is the right to petition either the courts or the administrative agencies for redressing the grievance and what happens is that you know I don't know if it's the political culture whatever but there's a tendency of the court system to throw up all these obstacles to protect our beloved city councils and school boards from these folks and the kinds of cases that they bring I mean some of it is legitimate the courts they look at we're not in the business of running your town that's why you elect select board members and I understand that but I've really seen in the last few years in my view that that really goes overboard and they you know the sign is the only one at the end we don't want you I just want to take a minute to suggest that the laws that even authorize petitions sometimes are skewed against the petitioners if you were to have a great idea that you would like to have a zoning change and you were to get 5% to put the other petition and you'd submit it to the planning commission the planning commission would be obliged to hold a hearing and not to touch it they have to turn it over to the select board so it remains pure except for maybe you know to get the wrong number or something and then the select board gets it and they're mandated to hold a hearing within a certain number of days so we're getting a nice you know of course here we've got a little pace going and then they can do one of three things they can adopt it or they can deny it or they can take no action and if they deny it then within 30 days 35% can force a vote to have the vote directly made by the people instead of by the select board but if they do nothing the law says that that petition to force a vote on it has to wait 10 months and that goes with what John's saying which is the aging of that fierce concern will have dissipated and no one will care about it and goodness knows if my folks ever get a vote on the sports teams it isn't going to amount to much because it's going to be 2-3 years down the road but the principle is good so this is so essential to me it seems to me that if the more we discourage people from having a say in government the more likely government remains isolated and unresponsive and where are we going to go from there can I just follow up with that with what happened to Burlingan and the F-35 vote was really interesting sort of side effect Burlingan voted and it was by a pretty wide margin that they didn't want the plane there and Winooski, if you've ever been to Winooski and had to live under the jet staking off which I did in college when they had the delta daggers in there after burners, wow Winooski was on record of being opposed to it but what happened as a result of the Burlington vote was then the city of South Burlington city council came out and said you know what, we're really not crazy about the airplane either and that was a result of the vote in Burlingan so your idea about opening up to this kind of getting the juices flowing about discussion your precedent really had that effect very demonstrably in this case two questions I'm 83 years old so forgive me if my question is so vague you can't answer it we're lawyers, we're in the business of vague pardon pardon me I said we're lawyers, we're in the business of vague when I was a kid I went around like Dad who practiced law up in Caledonia County I remember one trial where he was defending several boys for disturbance of a peace with a jury you don't see that nowadays do you? incidentally we still have a right to a jury trial in a criminal matter but there are and there we have jury trials in civil cases but the numbers today are amazingly low I don't remember what they were but they're less than like 2% of the number of cases that we've heard but yes, that's one of your fundamental rights to have a jury trial and the other thing and this this is the arrows I just wanted to say in the 1600s the king was on top subjects were underneath absolutely I'm a divine right of kings but within the course of a century that had been turned on its head so the people are on top and government officials are considered their trustees and servants that's that whole notion of accountability that is the central theme of our discussion today so here's a case where number two question states have passed marijuana regulations taking the harness off to a certain extent and this was all done by legislators by the general public right? in Vermont it was a legislator yeah but Vermont is the only one that ever did from the top how are those going in a different direction? certain western states have the right for initiative which means you can petition to have a law introduced and passed or referendum which is that it will pass only if the legislature or if the people approve it but we don't have that ironically we have one municipality in Vermont that has initiative and referendum and that's Brattleburg and it is somewhat abused there but at least it's on the books and it is used on a regular basis to condemn those that don't have it thank you very much just one more question now that I'm 83 I've talked with lawyers intermittently here and there and I've never run across one that wasn't affected I had a gut response to the fact that when they tell the lawyer whose judge is going to run things they get a pain in their gut because they seem to know I've been through this before yeah is that yeah that's happened that's like a hero on the back of your neck but you know the familiar feeling of losing a case going out in the car beating on the truck saying everything was wrong but after a while if you have enough of those cases in a row begin to think we can't blame these people that are judges we chose them to make these decisions and we're going to live with them we don't like them, we'll appeal wasn't it justice Hayes that I don't know if I'm getting this because you have three inalienable rights one is to retire to your local cadaver the second one is to curse the court and the third one is to take an appeal thank you sir, yes there's some things I've heard on the BBC or late night things bubbled up and disturbing that the army president has decided to use the presidency as a a profit center which strikes me as one of the things that was struck down during the reign of Charles I which came to a very abrupt end what's going on how can this guy keep on yeah, I can do it well are we going to have to buy a little crown for this guy maybe we can borrow one from Putin but I don't know if they say anything can you move the party of what made North Korea really cheap okay, you ready for this okay, three days after Trump assumed the presidency a group in New York led by my daughter Zephyr sued Trump in federal court for violating what's called the emoluments clause of the constitution which prohibits the president or any other federal government official from using their office for personal profit now that particular litigation ran into a little headwind in the lower court but it's on appeal but another case brought by the state of Maryland and I believe the District of Columbia has in fact got some traction and is working its way up through the courts so you're absolutely right to be up to object to that it is absolutely unconstitutional unethical, the only question is is that the kind of problem that the courts are very well equipped to deal with and if the courts can't do it then maybe somebody at some point, if politics shift just a little bit somebody ought to think about the device of impeachment that's a little point I had a comment on that I actually had a conversation with our congressman two days ago about this administration and I said you gotta understand what's going on I don't know if you guys have watched this stuff but this administration is like Latin American telenovela it's an endless soap opera that has all these subplots and if you ever watch those things the subplots never get resolved it grabs your attention and another one and another one and it's just an endless process and to answer your question one of my fear is that people are already eyes happening to me, it becomes sudden to all this stuff I mean it's a constant deluge I get to the point where if I want to watch screaming and yelling I turn the channel to the sports center I've had that I saw a certain handle over here yes I forget my ignorance about the referendum process I'm not a reminder by birth but what's the history of binding referendum movement as per California had like California had and how does the Bar Association feel about it well I can't speak for this association but I tell you that we've never had binding referendum at the state level I guess what I meant is there a movement towards that, has there been any history of people trying to implement that and being sparked by the list I know I know that as I mentioned the Brattleboro Charter was raised there and I've written several draft charters over the time where the petitioners had wanted to include it it's not unconstitutional it's just that it has to come in through state law it can't be adopted by the town it has to be a charter the town adopts the charter and then they send it to legislature and the legislature usually approves it but there has been no state referendum at that point and we have to think about Vermont we celebrate it in Vermont life as the home of direct democracy this is where the people rule but we really only want to see you when it's time to be elected or when we need a budget passed and otherwise stay home and watch TV what would require to be a simple majority of the legislature both houses to invoke a to pass a binding no there would need to be a constitutional amendment because section six of the Vermont constitution says a legislature decides the law constitutional amendment would be a constitutional amendment requires a two thirds vote of the senate a majority vote of the house from election vote of the senate again and vote of the house again and then a vote directly to the people at the following annual town meeting but they got rid of the ten year time lock we can move faster than that every four years but it's controlled by the legislature and if the legislature is made up principally of selectmen and trustees who have been reluctant to share power you may not find them to be as responsive on the area but tonight my way of gentle disagreement with my fellow panelists I testify before the Vermont legislature frequently and I think of all the governments all of the democratic assemblies and all of the states there probably is no other legislature which is more accessible than the Vermont legislature I think generally speaking our legislatures are not just looking after their own political skin I know some of them are but I think they really are trying and have tried consistently to do the right thing and the creative thing so I just feel blessed to live in Vermont in this state as far as the operation of democracy goes compared to any other state in the union now these guys obviously disagree I didn't say that I was going to suggest one of the reasons probably that initiative didn't get traction in Vermont when I was a kid the population of Vermont was 300,000 which was what it was at the time of the Civil War it took us 100 years to recoup and that's a city state that's a small population so it's pretty accountable and pretty responsible I don't pretend to know what the history of initiative and referendum was in the western states and why that got traction there as opposed to the east but I suspect one of the reasons that that idea hasn't gotten a lot of traction in Vermont is basically wasn't needed I think a lot of people would also be afraid keep in mind what happened what was happening 15 to 20 years ago a lot of these initiatives were being hijacked by well money and special interests that were getting very well considered through these public initiatives I mean everybody in Vermont loves them now because that's my pocket legalized in both states but you know there's the old thing about be careful what you wish for you might get it and those have been views probably isn't the word but they've been really taken over and used by money and special interests so that's also consideration yeah you mentioned Brownwell they have a representative town meeting was there a relation between that and the initiative it came in at the same time they actually have you know you're trying to progressive ideas is referendum initiative and public recall and they have all 3D in their charter and it came in at the same time they had the representative town meeting representative town meeting means they elect 100 voters and they do what people do at town meetings say Mike and it's now authorized by general law that any town could go to a representative town meeting system but so far nobody has done it and it's worth pointing out that we have cities and we have towns and some cities such as Burlington and South Burlington rely on a system which is more representative government than direct democracy that's true and the fights that have come out of the cities have to do with perhaps a little chafing by the voters that they don't have as much opportunity or as much effect in terms of reaching out to their officials to see what if they could express their opinions it's also a question though the political culture in the community in Burlington I was involved in the city government in the 80s when Bernie Sanders was mayor but there was always a political culture in Burlington voters got a 5% petition for something on the ballot the city councilors and the mayor that opposed that were doing very much at their own risk generally speaking those items were put on the ballot that was just the culture not a similar culture in South Burlington obviously or in other places in fact these non-binding referendum in the 80s as Paul mentioned and Peter mentioned were the bread and butter of town meeting I mean there would be nuclear freeze issues there would be all these issues that were on and one of the ideas was to bring people out again interested in town meeting by bringing national and international issues and putting those on the ballot I believe that by the way didn't Brad a plural vote that if George Bush showed up in town they would have them arrested that's true more questions I'd be very much interested in your opinion of we have so many problems and how come in our in our schools the students are not taught some of the truths that we all know about later on how come you know they can name passes being down from the very bad burden and all that stuff but do they know history from this point of view or do they just know 1492 as a historian it's always hard to defend the chronological approach to history but I know that there's a constant questioning in the educational system as to whether we do enough in terms of what we used to call civics teaching people about town meaning and it's shown in you know I have a lot of small town clients and nobody wants to run for select board and nobody wants to get involved and this is going to change everything because now we're starting to hear regional planning commission saying well we could run these towns and we may be going in a traditional way of approaching highway maintenance and other matters Vermont which has a reputation as again as being this sanctum of direct democracy is in fact one of the most centralized states other than perhaps Hawaii we don't have any county government we have town government where we do a lot of things but the courts have traditionally treated towns as in one case, mere creatures of the legislatures and so how does that go with Dylan's rule, only those powers expressly granted are necessarily implied oh god did I have a diet of that in the 80s and I was in the city attorney's office and part of it was you couldn't poop because they would say the legislature wouldn't let you do it and we were always going down there with charter changes so we wouldn't have clear authority to do this and there's always a fight every year government, municipal corporations and senate operations to get stuff through and many times we had the process for charter amendments is you have to first get a referendum and get approval and we had charter provisions that would pass by 65% of the voters I was there at the time and I remember there was a general belief that if Burlington wants they can't have it there was no soup for you any more questions? yeah any of you that have any closing words you'd like to offer us we covered a lot here I have a question from my fellow panelist on the other side I want to get a true answer from you John is it not true that your grandfather was convicted for murdering somebody no that's not true grandfather no who shot that guy that was my step great grandfather ok you shot that guy that's alright let me give you the story the actual story you brought it up the actual story was the actual story was the actual story was the anarchist for coming to bust up the meeting at the social slave hall in granite street and my step great grandfather stood out of the front step of the courthouse and fired a warning shot in the air but he went like this and Ilya Kordy who was the greatest sculptor in history in the city of Barry happened to be looking out of the window of the 2nd or 3rd floor and caught in the ramp and was killed and my great grandfather's name was Goreto and he dropped his pistol and ran to the house of the nearest judge and turned himself and he was convicted for manslaughter not for murder and he spent a winter prison as a trustee of the warden translating Italian and English for the warden so there alright and on that note thank you all so much for coming tonight and thank you to the legal women boarders and to the college numbered library for hosting this event thank you


QuickBooks Desktop 2023 preferences. Let's do it within 2-its QuickBooks Desktop 2023. Support accounting instruction by clicking the link below giving you a free month membership to all of the content on our website broken out by category further broken out by course each course then organized in a logical reasonable fashion making it much more easy to find what you need then can be done on a YouTube page we also include added resources such as excel practice problems pdf files and more like QuickBooks backup files when applicable so once again click the link below for a free month membership to our website and all the content on it in prior presentations we downloaded and installed the QuickBooks desktop software represented by this icon we then opened up the sample file represented by this icon this icon being the data file this icon being the program opening up the program and then we're going to open up the data file within it I'm not going to go through this intro process going forward after this presentation we'll just jump right into the home page in the software I just want to emphasize the difference between the software and the data file one more time here the last file we had open is up top you can see the mapping to that on the C drive here if you don't know where it is I'm going to go ahead and open this one up the prior windows we had open are going to be open when we open this thing up I'm going to close these windows in the middle gray area I'm just going to x out here I'm going to x out here I'm going to x out here so now we just have this gray area in the middle I'm going to open up the home page I'm going to go to the company drop down reopen that home page opens up in the middle I'm going to maximize it to the gray area this is our normal routine whenever opening up the QuickBooks file typically I like to have the open windows over here which you could do this way or you can go to the view drop down and go to the open windows so we now have the sample file which already has data in it the next thing we want to do is just touch on the company preferences and you can find the preferences by going to the edit drop down and then go to the preferences down at the bottom now there's a whole lot of preferences you got the categories on the left hand side so all these categories and then you have the two tabs usually up top my preferences and then the company preferences now we're going to go into the preferences in a lot more detail on the second half of the course when we start up a new company file one of the reasons for that is because the sample company that we have here being a construction company has already altered some of the preferences from the default to accommodate it being you know basically a construction company and they adjusted some of the preferences like the classes and so on so and that's normally the case oftentimes when you go to work for another business in other words many of the presences will be set up when you start a new company file that process of starting up the new company file will align some of the preferences during that time and then after the company file is set up you can alter some of the preferences that had been put in place when you set up the company file and of course there are other preferences that are in you know that are kind of independent might not be set up during the setup process of the company so the first half of the course we're working with a company file that has in essence the major preferences already set up altered from the default to accommodate the particular company that we're looking at and we're going to work within that the second half of the course will start a new company and when we set up the company file many of these preferences will be set up as we set up the company file then we'll go through the whole preferences again and we'll look through each of these categories in detail and get a lot more detail on each of those categories and what these what these different preferences will do but just to get a general idea this is where the preferences are you got the accounting you got the bills the calendar the checking the desktop the finance the general the general and the accounting are probably two of the biggest kind of areas where you'll be dealing with the preferences you got the sales tax that you got to turn on the sales tax and so on but again we'll dive into those in a lot more detail in the second half of the course if you have detailed questions about the preferences then you could jump there if you so choose remember many of these preferences will be set up when we set up the company file and then you can change them basically by going into the preferences here or add other kind of preferences that aren't in there when we set up the new company file accounting i don't know anyone in accounting


future of English considering its derivatives across the world. From the time of the American Revolution and onward, there has been a distinctive trend for American English and British English dialects to move away from each other. Whether taught in American English or British English, most people of either type will have little trouble understanding each other. Unlike the many dialects of China, English is a pretty ubiquitous language across the board, with a spattering of unique regional words. Rise of American Variant. The two most prominent English dialects were intertwined throughout their collective histories because the British were a colonizer of the empty lands of America. The colony and the mainland started together, but the dialect slowly diverged over time. Interestingly, different dialect styles were more preferred in one era and in the past in contrast to recently. British English was the world's English from 1700 to the millennium, while American English has become more robust throughout the world, including Asia. Phonetic System Derivation. Over time many vowel sounds diverged between the two became different, like the word map. The British now use a flatter sound like the A in on while American English uses a more nasal A sound like the sound in the American version of bat. The O sound also has a distinctive difference. For example, the Americans use the A sound for the word clock, while the British use the O sound in the American version of fork.  For the O sound, Brits use a sound like the O in order, while the Americans use a long O sound in the word boat. Word endings like berry, berry, airy pretty much sound the same when a Brit ends a word with one, like airy. However, un-Americans sound different on each of these endings, like urie, airy, urie. Also, the quintessential British sound for the O sound is a giveaway, pronounced like bean, while been by Americans. Overall there is more slurring of vowels sounds in British English than American English. But these are all generalizations about the differences. Because in America and Britain there are many different regional dialects. Common American dialect. In the United States, the national recognized dialect for speaking is the Midwest dialect. This is a dialect that most newscasters use and uses a more nasal A and crisp consonants. With little variations, the Midwest dialect is spoken in the upper Midwest, NYC, Pacific Northwest and parts of California. Heading to the south opens up the more twangy country dialect. This dialect has softer vowel sound and slurred or missing consonants. Example, U-A versus Y-A-L. It is very distinctive and can be easily picked up by most English speakers. This dialect encompasses the Southeast United States. While, the Southwest has a mixture of Southern dialect, not as strong as the Southeast. It is crisper than the Southern dialect with less slurring. Think of Texas. That is it. Coexistence of British dialects. In Britain, many dialects abound. Even more in the Commonwealth of countries. But the three most prominent are British English, Cockney, and Irish. Irish has a beautiful lilt. It is not that different in pronunciation than standard British English but has a kind of melody that is imposed over the words. Beyond this, there are region phrase differences like I do work versus I usually work. Cockney is a dialect of workers of England and it is known by its rough glottal sound and dropped consonants. Canadian speech. One more dialect must be talked about. The Canadian dialect is a mixture of the two dialects. Leaning more American sounding in the last 50 years, it still carries very British components like the British bin and a flatter A sound, while having a totally unique O sound like in Canadian word hosers. Are there only British English and American English? So, as one can tell there is not just the British or American English. Even within these countries, the English dialect changes. However, this phenomenon is not entirely true over all of America in general. There are still pockets off English and North America that are more closely aligned with 1,700 British English than actually in Great Britain itself. For instance, the sound are well prevalent in the English of the 1700s, not dropped like today's British. Like 10 year Virginia and Ireland only 12 miles off the coast near Washington DC. The 400 plus settlers are dependents of the early British settlers. Because they have been isolated on this island and have a very little mix with outsiders, these dependents have the closest form of Shakespearean English. Even more so than on the Great Britain archipelago. To hear these folks speak is like being transported back to the 1740s. Some of their unique communication forms, like saying the opposite of what they mean to convey a point, is only found here. Example, they might say the store is ready to visit, which means the store is actually closed. In the 1850s, the way British aristocracy and royalty spoke was seen as upper crust. This dialect shows that someone is well educated, well mannered and superior. This style was inherent in the Queen Elizabeth I era. Humorously, the dialect Main Street Americans speak today is closer to to the Queen Elizabeth I dialect than Queen Elizabeth II, who has a normal British dialect. Future of English. So, what is the future of English? Will English change more over the next 100 years? Many hypothesize over time theorize that English will get closer to a standard over the next 100 years. This is because global communication has brought the English world together. Americans watch British TV and vice versa. But studies have been done to see if dialects are dying out. The answer is no. More dialects are being created across the globe. This happens when English penetrates new areas as a second language. It becomes intermixed into the original language, like Spanglish and the Philippines, Singlish and Singapore and others. The shortening of the language is also occurring. Texting is a huge culprit. Instead of saying we're laughing out loud, we just say lol articles adjectives like the or dropped a new adjectives are being formed. Technology like Google Translate is having a huge impact on learners.  If one listens to recordings spoken just 50 years ago, the conclusion would be that we do not speak that way anymore. Language is always evolving. The only thing that is certain is change. Speak with an ITTT advisor today to put together your personal plan for teaching English abroad. Send us an email or call us toll free at 1-800-490-0531 to speak with an ITTT advisor today.