In Cyberspace, Forever - NYTimes.com Re "Erasing History," by Bill Keller (column, nytimes.com, April 29): As editor in chief of a law school newspaper, I frequently fielded complaints from individuals who sought to have articles scrubbed from the historical record. Of far greater concern, however, was the fact that students were too scared to speak out on divisive topics in the first place, for fear that doing so would affect their professional prospects decades later. In a recent Supreme Court case, Doe v. Reed (2010), Justice Antonin Scalia wrote, "Requiring people to stand up in public for their political acts fosters civic courage, without which democracy is doomed." For democracy to thrive, we must encourage people to speak their minds, particularly on issues of great civic controversy. That doesn't happen by taking an eraser to history, but instead by proudly asserting that juvenile mistakes and misguided beliefs are common hurdles on the road to adulthood and that reinvention is possible only by owning, not shrouding, our pasts. The writer is a lawyer and a former editor in chief of the Harvard Law Record.