John Banzhaf

John Francis Banzhaf III (born July 2, 1940) is an American public interest lawyer, legal activist and law professor at George Washington University Law School.

He is the founder of an antismoking advocacy group, Action on Smoking and Health.

He is noted for his advocacy and use of lawsuits as a method to promote what he believes is the public interest.

Banzhaf was born July 2, 1940, in New York City.

He graduated at the age of 15 from Manhattan's Stuyvesant High School, one of the three academically elite high-schools of the NYC Public School System.

He went on to graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and from Columbia Law School with a Juris Doctor.

Banzhaf filed a complaint with the Maryland's Attorney Grievance Commission against Prosecutor Marilyn Mosby, the State's attorney of Baltimore, saying she did not have probable cause to charge six officers in the death of Freddie Gray, and also that she repeatedly withheld evidence from the officers' defense attorneys.

He compared her to Mike Nifong and his handling of the Duke lacrosse case.

Banzhaf got an early start in legal advocacy.

While still a student in law school, he was assigned to research and draft a note for the Columbia Law Review on whether computer programs and other software could be protected under U.S. copyright law.

The United States Patent Office had previously declined to grant any patents on software, and no computer program copyrights had ever been recognized.

As part of his research, Banzhaf sought to register copyrights on two programs he had written: one in printed form, and the other recorded on magnetic tape.

In 1964, the United States Copyright Office registered two copyrights of Banzhaf, thereby recognizing for the first time the validity of this new form of legal protection.

One year later, he testified at a congressional hearing at which he urged, ultimately successfully, that the long-awaited revision of US copyright law should expressly recognize computer and data processing issues.

Banzhaf studied the Nassau County Board's voting system, which allocated the total of 30 votes to its municipalities as follows:

A simple majority of 16 votes sufficed to win a vote.

In Banzhaf's notation, [Hempstead #1, Hempstead #2, North Hempstead, Oyster Bay, Glen Cove, Long Beach] are A-F in [16; 9, 9, 7, 3, 1, 1]

There are 32 winning coalitions, and 48 swing votes:

AB AC BC ABC AB D AB E AB F AC D AC E AC F BC D BC E BC F ABCD ABCE ABCF AB DE AB DF AB EF AC DE AC DF AC EF BC DE BC DF BC EF ABCDE ABCDF ABCEF AB DEF AC DEF BC DEF ABCDEF

Banzhaf proposed an index, now known as the "Banzhaf index", to measure the power of each municipality:

Banzhaf argued that a voting arrangement that gives zero power to one sixth of the county's population is unfair, and sued the board.

The Banzhaf power index has been used as a way to measure voting power, along with the Shapley–Shubik power index.

Banzhaf has utilized a clinical-project format in some of his law classes, rather than a more traditional lecture and academic study format.

Students are divided into teams and asked to work on some genuine consumer problems.

One of the students' high-profile projects was a suit against former Vice-President Spiro Agnew seeking to force him to repay the bribes he accepted while Governor of Maryland.

Agnew was ordered to repay the state the $147,500 in kickbacks, with interest of $101,235, for a total of $248,735.

In late 1966, John Banzhaf asked a local television station, WCBS-TV, to provide air time for announcements against smoking.

Much of Banzhaf's tobacco work has been done through the Action on Smoking and Health, a nonprofit he founded in 1967.

The station refused, so Banzhaf filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 1967.

The FCC's fairness doctrine required broadcasters to provide free air time to opposing views of matters of public controversy.

In his complaint, Banzhaf argued that tobacco advertisements were broadcasting only pro-smoking messages; he argued that, as a public service, the broadcasters should be required to show an equal number of anti-smoking messages.

On June 2, 1967, the FCC announced its decision that its fairness doctrine applied to the request for anti-smoking announcements.

The FCC stated that the public should hear an anti-smoking viewpoint.

However, the FCC required only the ratio of one anti-smoking message for each four cigarette advertisements (not the one-to-one ratio suggested by Banzhaf).

The tobacco industry appealed against this decision, but it was upheld by the United States Court of Appeals and the United States Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

"Various governmental and voluntary health organizations made extremely creative spots and provided them to stations."

The project was started in 1976 by three students in Banzhaf's class on public interest law.

The students recruited three Maryland residents to carry the suit.

Another case that attracted much attention targeted the McDonald's restaurant chain.

One of Banzhaf's students, James Pizzirusso, successfully sued McDonald's in 2001 for precooking their French fries in beef fat and not warning vegetarians and beef-avoiders about it; in 2002 he won a class-action settlement of $12.5 million.