Less Safe, Less Free? The Failure of Preemption in the War on Terror

SPEAKER BIOS

David Cole served as a law clerk to Judge Arlin M. Adams of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit after graduating from Yale Law School. Professor Cole then became a staff attorney for the Center for Constitutional Rights where he litigated a number of major First Amendment cases. He continues to litigate First Amendment and other constitutional issues as a volunteer staff attorney at the Center. He has published in a variety of areas, including civil rights, criminal justice, constitutional law and law and literature. He is the legal affairs correspondent for The Nation, a commentator on National Public Radio: All Things Considered, and the author of three books: Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism (New Press, 2d ed. 2005); Terrorism and the Constitution: Sacrificing Civil Liberties for National Security (New Press, 3d ed. 2005) (with James X. Dempsey); and No Equal Justice: Race and Class in the American Criminal Justice System (New Press, 1999). Enemy Aliens received the American Book Award and the Hefner First Amendment Prize in 2004. No Equal Justice was named Best Nonfiction Book of 1999 by the Boston Book Review, best book on an issue of national policy in 1999 by the American Political Science Association, and was awarded the Alpha Sigma Nu prize from the Jesuit Honor Society in 2001. Professor Cole has received numerous awards for his civil rights and civil liberties work, including from the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of the Freedom of Expression, the American Bar Association’s Individual Rights and Responsibilities Section, the National Lawyers Guild, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, the Political Asylum and Immigrants’ Rights Project, the American Muslim Council, and Trial Lawyers for Public Justice.

MODERATOR
Stephen Holmes is a Faculty Research Advisor at the Center on Law and Security and the Walter E. Meyer Professor of Law at NYU School of Law. His fields of specialization include the history of liberalism, the disappointments of democratization after communism, and the difficulty of combating terrorism within the limits of liberal constitutionalism. In 2003, he was selected as a Carnegie Scholar. From 1997 to 2000, he was a professor of politics at Princeton. From 1985 to 1997, he was professor of politics and law at the Law School and Political Science Department of the University of Chicago. From 1979 to 1985, he taught at the Department of Government at Harvard University. He was also the editor-in-chief of the East European Constitutional Review from 1993-2003. He is the author of Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modern Liberalism (Yale University Press, 1984), The Anatomy of Antiliberalism (Harvard University Press, 1993), Passions and Constraint: On the Theory of Liberal Democracy (University of Chicago Press, 1995), and co-author (with Cass Sunstein) of The Cost of Rights: Why Liberty Depends on Taxes (Norton, 1999). His most recent book, The Matador’s Cape: America’s Reckless Response to the War on Terror was published in spring 2007.