The Davis-Levin First Amendment debate coming up Saturday, presented by the American Civil Liberties Union of Hawai'i and this writer, will be treated to what Judge Robert Bork once called an intellectual feast designed to push the opposition to the limits of its logic. The debate will feature former Clinton family nemesis and Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr of the conservative and faith-based right, versus national ACLU president Nadine Strossen of the liberal and secular left.

Starr, now 59 and dean at the Pepperdine Law School in Malibu, Calif., has had a brilliant career. Before serving as independent counsel for what started out as the Whitewater probe of 1994 to 1999, he served as a clerk to U.S. Chief Justice Warren Burger, as solicitor general for President George H.W. Bush and as a judge on what is perhaps the second-most-powerful court in America, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. In 2002, his book, "First Among Equals: The Supreme Court in American Life," was published.

While in high school in his native Texas during the 1960s, Starr was drawn to constitutional law and the U.S. Supreme Court by what he calls the "sharply joined issues of the day." He didn't know then that 30 years later he would be appearing before the court as solicitor general to argue, for example, that the court should overturn Roe v. Wade. (More recently, in a talk at Stanford Law School, Starr said, "I think for those who take faith seriously, and I do, I am unashamedly a Christian, that it is nonetheless our duty as professionals to strive to the utmost to follow the dictates of the law. And thus let's go ahead and just be very straightforward, Roe v. Wade holds. Doesn't mean I agree with it, but I accept it.")

Strossen, too, has risen to prominence on her brilliance. She was born in Jersey City, N.J., attended public school in Minnesota and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard and magnum cum laude from Harvard Law in 1975, two years after Starr had graduated from Duke Law School. Today, like many archetypal liberals, she lives on Manhattan's Upper West Side.

Strossen's favorite book, devoured at age 11 and reread many times since, is Les Miserables. Not surprisingly, Strossen's favorite court opinion is Justice Robert Jackson's for the majority in West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette. Jackson noted that "freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much" and ruled that government even in the midst of World War II may not compel schoolchildren to salute the flag or engage in any other prescribed form of orthodoxy.

Starr and Strossen, in spite of their positions on the political and social spectrum, mostly agree on the issue sometimes framed as judicial activism versus judicial self-restraint or strict construction. Indeed, this debate on how to go about interpreting the meanings of the Constitution is alive and well. President Bush, for example, has pronounced himself to be a strict-constructionist.

Starr, unlike many conservatives, recognizes judicial activism as integral to the court's role. He argues that the court's extension of its reach to decide Bush v. Gore illustrated the modern court's most abiding characteristic: "Ultimately in our system of government, the Supreme Court is first among equals." He suggests that liberals who object to Bush v. Gore and the court's seizure of power are, if not hypocrites, at least poor students of history.

Chides Strossen of this sort of conservative acclaim for Bush v. Gore: "So much for so-called conservatives decrying 'judicial activism!' "

Both Starr and Strossen seem to agree that the best approach to jurisprudence is textualism, the foundation for Chief Justice John Marshall's famous exhortation: "We must never forget that it is a Constitution that we are expounding."

Not to be confused with strict-constructionism, textualism proffers that the context of the Constitution requires an expansive yet reasonable interpretation designed to include all that the text fairly means. Says Strossen, "The text itself demonstrates that the framers intended certain provisions to be open-ended, and therefore to be interpreted in the light of changing conditions." Hence freedom of speech and of the press really refers to freedom of expression.