Current Student Event

David Cole is a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, a volunteer staff attorney for the Center for Constitutional Rights, the legal affairs correspondent for The Nation, a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, and a commentator on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. He is the author of two award-winning books, Enemy Aliens, which received the American Book Award in 2004, and No Equal Justice: Race and Class in the American Criminal Justice System, which was named Best Non-Fiction Book of 1999 by the Boston Book Review, and best book on an issue of national policy in 1999 by the American Political Science Association. His most recent book, published in September 2007, is entitled Less Safe, Less Free: Why America is Losing the War on Terror.

He has litigated many significant constitutional cases, including Texas v. Johnson and United States v. Eichman, which extended First Amendment protection to flagburning, National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley, which challenged political content restriction on NEA funding, and Massachusetts v. Sullivan, which challenged restrictions on what federally-funded family planning centers could tell women about abortion. Since 9/11, he has been involved in many of the nation’s most important cases involving civil liberties and national security.

New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis has called David “one of the country’s great legal voices for civil liberties today,” and Nat Hentoff has called him “a one-man Committee of Correspondence in the tradition of patriot Sam Adams.” Former CIA Director James Woolsey called David’s book, Enemy Aliens, “the essential book in the field.” David has received numerous awards for his human rights work, including from the Society of American Law Teachers, the National Lawyers Guild, the ACLU of Southern California, the ABA Section on Individual Rights and Responsibilities, and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.

Reserve your spot by April 2.