1. John Francis Banzhaf III is an American public interest lawyer, legal activist, and law professor at the George Washington University Law School.
27 Facts About John Banzhaf
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John Banzhaf is the founder of an antismoking advocacy group, Action on Smoking and Health.
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John Banzhaf is noted for his advocacy and use of lawsuits as a method to promote what he believes is the public interest.
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John Banzhaf graduated at the age of 15 from Manhattan's Stuyvesant High School, one of the three academically elite high schools of the New York City Public School System.
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John Banzhaf 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.
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John Banzhaf compared her to Mike Nifong and his handling of the Duke lacrosse case.
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In 1964, the United States Copyright Office registered two copyrights of John Banzhaf, thereby recognizing for the first time the validity of this new form of legal protection.
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John Banzhaf studied the Nassau County Board's voting system, which allocated the total of 30 votes to its municipalities as follows:.
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John Banzhaf proposed an index, now known as the "John Banzhaf index", to measure the power of each municipality:.
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John Banzhaf argued that a voting arrangement that gives zero power to one-sixth of the county's population is unfair and sued the board.
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John Banzhaf has used a clinical-project format in some of his law classes, rather than a more traditional lecture and academic study format.
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In late 1966, John Banzhaf asked a local television station, WCBS-TV, to provide air time for announcements against smoking.
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The station refused, so John Banzhaf filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission in 1967.
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In 1969, Ralph Nader had petitioned the Federal Aviation Administration to ban smoking on all flights, when John Banzhaf petitioned the FAA to require separate smoking and nonsmoking sections on domestic flights.
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In 1972, both Nader and John Banzhaf filed petitions with the Civil Aeronautics Board, which largely granted their petitions.
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In particular, John Banzhaf has criticized the contracts for soft drink machines in schools and McDonald's, alleging that both have helped to contribute to childhood obesity.
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In 2003, John Banzhaf began criticizing "pouring rights" contracts, which he called "Cokes for Kickbacks" contracts.
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John Banzhaf has written that such contracts have increased soft-drink consumption and thereby contributed to the epidemic of childhood obesity.
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Obesity and McDonald's were discussed in the 2004 film Super Size Me by Morgan Spurlock, in which John Banzhaf is repeatedly interviewed.
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In one scene, Spurlock and John Banzhaf have a discussion while eating at McDonald's.
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John 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 that she repeatedly withheld evidence from the officers' defense attorneys.
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John Banzhaf compared her to Mike Nifong and his handling of the Duke lacrosse case.
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John Banzhaf filed a motion requesting that the federal government appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the role of the White House in what became known as the Watergate scandal.
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In December 2020, complaints written to Georgia state authorities by Banzhaf charged that, while President of the United States, Donald J Trump appeared to violate three Georgia penal codes during a leaked and subsequently widely publicized phone call of January 2,2021, with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
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John Banzhaf was criticized for his 2011 lawsuits and Human Rights charges against the Catholic University of America.
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Later in 2011, John Banzhaf filed a complaint with the DC Office of Human Rights claiming Muslim students were being discriminated against because of lack of adequate prayer space.
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Adrian Brune wrote in American Lawyer that John Banzhaf had had conflicts with the Frontiers of Freedom Institute, which operated a website, banzhafwatch.