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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER, BYLINE: This is PLANET MONEY from NPR.

KAREN DUFFIN, HOST: 

For four decades, Chris Hansen worked as a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU, arguing big cases on things like Internet censorship and school desegregation.

CHRIS HANSEN: I love to sue people who've done wrong. I love to right wrongs through litigation. Oh, man, that's a good feeling.

ALEXI HOROWITZ-GHAZI, HOST: 

Chris' job was to be on the lookout for new kinds of civil rights violations and to figure out a legal strategy to fight back against them.

HANSEN: I used to tell people, I'd go in in the morning and read the paper and see what new outrage was going on around the country.

HOROWITZ-GHAZI: (Laughter).

HANSEN: See if there was a way to deal with it.

DUFFIN: But one day back in the fall of 2005, Chris gets his news hand-delivered. The ACLU science adviser pops her head into his office with an entirely different kind of issue than the kinds he usually deals with. She tells him, I think I found...