Join the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights, the Institute of Politics, and the University of Chicago Law School’s American Constitution Society chapter as we host Georgetown University Professor David Cole for an in-depth look at the lessons of torture in the aftermath of 9/11. 

Monday, April 6, 2015
12:00-1:15PM | Lunch provided
Location: University of Law School Room IV | 1111 E. 60th Street, Chicago
Introduction by: UChicago Law Professor Aziz Huq
Free and open to the public and press | On the record

About the Event
When the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee released its long-awaited report on the use of torture by the United States government last December, it generated a burst of headlines and a flurry of controversy, but little in the way of sustained public inquiry. Now nearly 15 years after 9/11, what are we to make of the report’s findings? What are the implications for national security and human rights? And where should we as a nation go from here? Georgetown University Law Professor David Cole is one of the nation’s foremost experts on the use of torture and the author of several acclaimed books, including The Torture Memos: Rationalizing the Unthinkable and Justice at War: The Men and Ideas That Shaped America's War on Terror. 

About David Cole
David Cole (@DavidColeGtown) is the Honorable George J. Mitchell Professor in Law and Public at Georgetown University Law Center, where he teaches constitutional law, national security and criminal justice. In addition to his work at Georgetown, Professor Cole is a volunteer attorney for the Center for Constitutional Rights, the legal affairs correspondent for The Nation, and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books. He is the author of seven books, including the American Book Award-winning Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism.

He has litigated many significant constitutional cases in the Supreme Court, including Texas v. Johnson and United States v. Eichman, which extended First Amendment protection to flag burning; National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley, which challenged political content restriction on NEA funding; and most recently, Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, which challenged the constitutionality of the statute prohibiting “material support” to terrorist groups, which makes speech advocating peace and human rights a crime.

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.” David has received numerous awards for his human rights work, including most recently the inaugural Norman Dorsen Prize from the ACLU for lifetime commitment to civil liberties.