Okay, I admit it, I used Hillary Clinton in my subject heading primarily to (a) pique your interest; and (b) get more search engine hits [Apparently, guest-blogging doesn’t give me access to Eugene’s metatags!]. I promise, though, that she’ll make an appearance … and soon.

But first, let me start with a thank-you to Eugene for inviting me to share my ideas in this space. It’s a real pleasure and honor to be here, not only among the regular “conspirators,” but also given the array of recent guest-bloggers including the likes of Cass Sunstein and James Q. Wilson. I’m afraid I won’t be able to reframe fundamental questions about the relationship between individuals and the state or empirically investigate the relationship between prison and crime, but I hope to say something in my own small academic corner. And, since I hope to build in the future on this work, I very much look forward to all of your comments and questions.

So now let’s return to Hillary Clinton. Back in October 2000 when she was first running for the Senate, the moderator at a televised debate asked for Clinton’s views on Bill 602P. Now, for those of you who’ve never heard of Bill 602P, you’re in good company: Clinton hadn’t either. What exactly was it? Yup, a tax increase: a proposal to impose a 5-cent tax on each e-mail message. Fortunately, as readers of this blog know well, Clinton is a tax-cutting crusader, and so she opposed the bill.

But who, you all might be asking, actually supported Bill 602P? Who could have been behind this plot to kill the goose of the Internet as it lays the golden eggs of diffusion of information? Clever readers with an economics bent will quickly intuit the answer. Who else but the evil monopolist whose business model was most threatened by the e-mail revolution: the U.S. Post Office.

Now, I hope it comes as no surprise that Bill 602P is an urban legend. But I use it because it tells us something about the perception of the Post Office in our so-called information age. The image of the Post Office in this story is one of a threatened monopolist and government bureaucracy with entrenched interests that seeks to retard the course of technological progress. In this vision one might even see the Post Office as Larry Lessig describes late twentieth century big media and telecommunications companies, as a dinosaur threatened by the Schumpeterian destabilizing impact of new communication technologies, only worse—a public dinosaur.

What I hope to do over the course of the week is to displace that image of the Post Office. I hope to convince you that the Post Office has -- like the Internet -- always been a medium of communications and that it served historically as a vehicle for a transformation in American society, just the sort that one imagines to be the result of a vast increase in the free flow of information.

More than that, however, I also hope to show you -- as Eugene pointed out in his welcome message -- that this relic of an earlier era shaped modern constitutional law. The basic idea is that choices about postal policy, made in the eighteenth century, eventually led to the shaping of three important constitutional doctrines: First Amendment "unconstitutional conditions," the First Amendment "right to receive" ideas, and the Fourth Amendment principle of communications privacy. On this, more details to follow. For now, though, I’m off to find a bunch of 42 ¢ stamps so I can send you all this “post.”