[Y]ears ago, Allen Gilbert cut out a quote from a lawmaker that was printed in a local newspaper. He enlarged it for posterity.
The quote? “It doesn’t trample on civil liberties too much.”
Gilbert smiled when he looked at the clipping.
“People don’t realize that just as there is no such thing as being only a little bit pregnant, there’s no such thing as being able to trample on civil liberties and not violate a person’s rights,” Gilbert said.
This month Gilbert is retiring from his position at the helm of the American Civil Liberties Union of Vermont.
For 12 years, Gilbert has been a fixture in the Statehouse, dogging key pieces of legislation that have an impact on one of the most important tenets of American democracy — free speech.
Gilbert, who is soft-spoken and direct, has been an indefatigable advocate for civil liberties in the nuanced process of legislative drafting. Sitting on the sidelines in committee rooms, Gilbert is frequently asked to give his opinion on how changes to legislation on health care, campaign finance, policing and an array of other issues could impact a Vermonter’s right to free speech, personal privacy protections and access to public meetings and public records.
A former Rutland Herald reporter and editor, Gilbert is in the habit of listening carefully to lawmakers, and though he has not been trained as a lawyer, he has the ability to quickly suss out his opponents and the potentially large impact of small language tweaks on broader civil liberties issues.
Gilbert came to the job almost by accident. He was the chair of the Worchester school board in the 1990s when he first became involved with the ACLU-Vermont. The board was a plaintiff in the Brigham lawsuit, a case that turned out to be seminal in establishing Act 60, a groundbreaking 1997 law that changed the funding mechanism for education.
Shortly after that, Gilbert was hired for the executive director position for the Vermont chapter of the civil liberties group.
When Gilbert started in 2004, he was the organization’s only full-time employee, and there were two part-time employees who worked with him in a small office space near the Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier. Under Gilbert’s watch, the Vermont chapter expanded to three full-time employees, two of whom are attorneys, and two other part-time staffers.
During his tenure, the ALCU-Vermont has become a central feature in the landscape of Vermont politics — almost literally. He helped move the organization to a downtown office space, just a 10-minute jaunt to the Statehouse.
Gilbert commands respect from many of his colleagues in the Statehouse.
Sen. Dick Sears, D-Bennington, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, sometimes joked when Gilbert came into the room, “Oh, you again.”
“He’s a real advocate,” Sears said. “He never backs off his positions, although he was willing to discuss compromise, but not too much.”
Sears said that Gilbert would make an effort before every session to sit down with him and discuss the ACLU’s priorities. At their meeting last fall, for example, they talked through difficult language in the privacy bill.
At times, Sears reflected, the two men have been on opposite sides of issues. Sears is an advocate of DNA collection. He sees it as a valuable law enforcement tool both for identifying perpetrators as well as exonerating people who have been wrongly convicted.
Gilbert has adamantly opposed the idea. He said in a recent blog post that a DNA collection system “would sweep up DNA not only from persons convicted of felony crimes (the current practice) but also from persons convicted of misdemeanors that carry a jail term as part of their maximum sentence.”
Another issue they faced off on was the registration of sex offenders. After the 2008 murder of a 12-year-old girl, the ACLU opposed efforts to expand the sex offender registry, Sears said.
“Frequently their positions are unpopular, but he sticks with them,” Sears said.
Defender General Matt Valerio, who frequently spent time in committee rooms with Gilbert, said the ACLU director “got the ear of people when other advocates failed at that.”
“Civil liberty is somewhat of an amoeba and there is room for different areas of thought,” Valerio said. “Allen brought a new and unique perspective because he wasn’t a lawyer, but he was nonetheless a pretty effective advocate.”
‘It’s not even over when it’s over’
Some things, Gilbert said, don’t change.
The ACLU-VT spends a lot of time and energy on maintaining basic constitutional rights, he said: freedom of speech, religious expression, separation of church and state, protection from search and seizure, and more.
“A civil right is never won, it always has to be continually fought for to preserve,” he said.
“It really is true. It’s never over. It’s not even over when it’s over.”
In addition to the basics, he said, new issues emerge with the times. In the post-9/11 landscape, security has become a major issue, he said. Another new Goliath is access to personal digital technology.
Gilbert dogged S.155, an omnibus privacy bill, as the legislation wended through the Senate and House this year. The final product, Gilbert said, takes big steps to protect the privacy of Vermonters’ electronic communications beyond the limits of a three-decade-old federal law.
Over the past decade, the ACLU of Vermont has made significant steps to further protect civil liberties in Vermont. Gilbert pointed to changes in public records law, particularly a change in the policy over who foots the bill for court fees when disputes about access to public records go to court.
The erosion of the press has been another change Gilbert has seen over the years, he said.
As the media has become financial unstable, the willingness of media outlets to use the courts to shore up legal access to records and other First Amendment issues has diminished, he said.
Somewhat ironically, one of Gilbert’s final fights with the ACLU was similar to his first: equity in education spending.
Last summer, the ACLU threatened to sue the state over caps on school spending that the Legislature passed as part of Act 46. School spending continued to be a major point of political wrangling through the second half of the biennium.
“Having been through this fight and having spent a good deal of my life defending the principle of equity of school resources for all kids, equal access to funds for all kids, I couldn’t believe I was seeing this happen again,” Gilbert said. “It was really disappointing.”
Some things in the Legislature have not changed in the dozen years he has been an advocate there, and discussions about school spending, he said, were no different.
“I think what’s been consistent is the tension between 180 people who have taken an oath when they’re elected to uphold the constitution always asking, while serving as legislators, basically, can we get away with this?” Gilbert said.
