Legal and Constitutional Protections for Free Speech in Academia in the US, UK, and Canada

Legal and Constitutional Protections for Free Speech in Academia in the US, UK, and Canada

Friday, February 11, 2022 | Zoom, Berkeley Law

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Event Description

The Public Law and Policy Program @ Berkeley Law, the Anglo-American Public Law and Policy Program @ Berkeley Law, and the Jack Miller Center present a webinar on Legal and Constitutional Protections for Free Speech in Academia in the US, UK, and Canada. on Friday, February 11th, beginning at 10:00 am PST. Professor Eric Kaufmann of the University of London, who is Canadian, will be participating from London. He will discuss his research on freedom of speech in academia in the U.S., the U.K. and Canada as well as proposed legislation in the U.K. parliament to protect free speech in colleges and universities in the UK. Professor Nadine Strossen of the New York School of Law and former head of the ACLU will join us from New York. She will comment on Professor Kaufmann’s findings, her own work on this subject, and legal and policy implications of the proposed legislation. Professor Keith Whittington of Princeton University and Dean Erwin Chemerinsky of the UC Berkeley School of Law will participate from Berkeley. They will also comment on Professor Kaufmann’s research and recommendations for legislation.

Panelists

Eric Kaufman

Eric Kaufmann is Professor of Politics at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the author of Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities (Penguin 2018; Abrams 2019); Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth (Profile 2010), The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America (Harvard 2004), The Orange Order (Oxford 2007) and Unionism and Orangeism in Northern Ireland since 1945 – with H. Patterson (Manchester 2007). He is co-editor, among others, of Political Demography (Oxford 2012) and Whither the Child: causes and consequences of low fertility (Paradigm 2012), and editor of Rethinking Ethnicity: Majority Groups and Dominant Minorities (Routledge 2004). An editor of the journal Nations & Nationalism, he has written for New York Times, Times of London, Financial Times, Newsweek International, Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines.

Keith Whittington  is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics at Princeton University and is currently the chair of Academic Freedom Alliance and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. He works on American constitutional history, politics and law, and on American political thought. He is the author of Repugnant Laws: Judicial Review of Acts of Congress from the Founding to the Present and Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech, among other works. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, Georgetown University Law Center, and the University of Texas School of Law, and he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He did his undergraduate work at the University of Texas at Austin and completed his Ph.D. in political science at Yale University.

Nadine Strossen is the past national President of the American Civil Liberties Union (1991-2008), is a leading expert and frequent speaker/media commentator on constitutional law and civil liberties, who has testified before Congress on multiple occasions, and has been named by the National Law Journal as one of America’s “100 most influential lawyers.” Her most recent book is HATE: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship.

Erwin Chemerinsky  became the 13th Dean of Berkeley Law on July 1, 2017, when he joined the faculty as the Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law.

Prior to assuming this position, from 2008-2017, he was the founding Dean and Distinguished Professor of Law, and Raymond Pryke Professor of First Amendment Law, at the University of California, Irvine School of Law. Before that, he was the Alston and Bird Professor of Law and Political Science at Duke University from 2004-2008, and from 1983-2004 was a professor at the University of Southern California Law School, including as the Sydney M. Irmas Professor of Public Interest Law, Legal Ethics, and Political Science. From 1980-1983, he was an assistant professor at DePaul College of Law.

He is the author of fourteen books, including leading casebooks and treatises about constitutional law, criminal procedure, and federal jurisdiction. His most recent books are Presumed Guilty: How the Supreme Court Empowered the Police and Subverted Civil Rights (Norton 2021), and The Religion Clauses: The Case for Separating Church and State (with Howard Gillman) (Oxford University Press 2020).

He also is the author of more than 200 law review articles. He is a contributing writer for the Opinion section of the Los Angeles Times, and writes regular columns for the Sacramento Bee, the ABA Journal, and the Daily Journal, and frequent op-eds in newspapers across the country. He frequently argues appellate cases, including in the United States Supreme Court.

In 2016, he was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2017, National Jurist magazine again named Dean Chemerinsky as the most influential person in legal education in the United States. In January 2021, he was named President-elect of the Association of American Law Schools.

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