MEDIA ADVISORY
MEDIA INVITED—-Call Joan M. Dim at 212.998.6849 to make a press reservation Wednesday, February 4, 6-8 PM —- FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC With a nod to the late “Fred Friendly’s Seminars,” a model of open debate and reasoned dialogue, NYU School of Law’s Center on Law and Security will host an “Open Forum” entitled, “Guantanamo: The Supreme Court Case and What it Will Mean.”
The “Open Forum, focusing on what will happen when the Supreme Court decides the Guantanamo case, will discuss the legal issues, precedents set and questions raised by the case. Questions to be discussed include:
- Are terrorism cases to be decided in the context of crime versus war and what does this mean for jurisdictional and other questions?
- What are the rights of American citizens versus foreign nationals in Guantanamo Bay, and how are our policies affecting U.S. foreign relations?
- Is there a need for the creation of terrorism courts, as opposed to military and civilian courts?
A Q & A will follow discussion.
The “Open Forum,” the first in a series of the Center’s public discussions, is free and open to the public. It will take place on Wednesday, Feb. 4 at 6-8 PM, NYU School of Law, Vanderbilt Hall, Greenberg Lounge, 40 Washington Square South. Participants include:
Norman Dorsen (Moderator) is the NYU Frederick and Grace A. Stokes Professor of Law and Co-Director, Arthur Garfield Hays Civil Liberties Program. He is also counselor to the President of the University. His first position after graduating from Harvard Law School in 1953 was as assistant to the General Counsel of the Secretary of the Army, where he worked on the famous Army-McCarthy Hearings. He then clerked for Justice John Page Marshall Harlan before coming to NYU in early 1961. A scholar with an international reputation gained by extensive publications on civil liberties, he is also an experienced appellate litigator, having argued six constitutional cases in the United States Supreme Court. He also participated in Gideon v. Wainwright, the Pentagon Papers Case, Roe v. Wade, and the Nixon Tapes Case. He served as President of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1976 to 1991. He was Chairman of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights for four years, and was founding president of both the Society of American Law Teachers and the U.S. Association of Constitutional Law. Professor Dorsen has written scores of articles and written or edited 13 books.
George Fletcher, Columbia Law Professor, writes and lectures on constitutional law, criminal law, and jurisprudence. He has published eight books, including, most recently, Romantics at War: Glory and Guilt in the Age of Terrorism (2002) and Our Secret Constitution: How Lincoln Redefined American Democracy (2001). His first major book, Rethinking Criminal Law (1978), is recognized as the leading theoretical work on criminal law in the English language. His other books and articles range from discussions of major themes of criminal law, to the theory of tort liability, to the history of American constitutional law. He speaks nine languages, and his work is well known in Europe, Latin America, Japan, and Korea.
David M. Golove, NYU Law School Professor, has secured a reputation as one of the most original scholars in constitutional law. Among his notable academic writings is a book-length article for the Michigan Law Review, “Treaty-Making and the Nation: The Historical Foundations of the Nationalist Conception of the Treaty Power.” In this article, Golove comprehensively considers a question of constitutional law that has been controversial from the moment of the nation’s birth in 1776 and remains so today. Can the United States government, through its power to make treaties, effectively regulate subjects that would otherwise be beyond the reach of Congress’s enumerated legislative powers? For example, a treaty prohibiting the death penalty? He answers yes, and in doing so has produced both a major work of legal historical scholarship and an important legal and constitutional defense of federal power. In 1995, an article by Golove in the Harvard Law Review dealt with another fundamental issue in foreign relations law: the undeniable fact that many international accords today are approved not through the treaty processes mandated in the U.S. Constitution, but by majority votes of both houses. In a more recent article published in the NYU Law Review, Golove challenges the distinguished constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe, in a debate over the interpretation of the Treaty Clause, which Golove defended in his Harvard Law Review article. In 1999, Golove published a piece in the University of Colorado Law Review supporting the President’s authority to order military operations to implement a United Nations Security Council Resolution without authorization by Congress. Most recently, Golove has written articles on the relationship between the President’s power as Commander in Chief and the international law of the war and on the constitutional issues raised by the delegation of regulatory authority to international entities, such as the WTO. Golove received his B.A. from Berkeley in 1979 and has law degrees from Boalt Hall and Yale. He teaches Constitutional Law and International Law. Professor Golove is a member of the faculty Executive Committee of the NYU Institute for International Law and Justice and Director of the J.D.-LL.M. program in international law. He is also the Co-Director of the NYU Center on Law and Security.
Ruth Wedgwood, Professor of International Law and Diplomacy at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. Wedgwood is also a Senior Fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, Member of the Secretary of State’s Advisory Committee on International Law, Member of the Defense Policy Board, U.S. Member of the U.N. HumanRights Committee, Co-Director of Studies of the Research Center of the Hague Academy of International Law, and Independent Expert for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. She is a frequent contributor to law journals, collected volumes on international law, and the Op-Ed pages of major newspapers. She is also a frequent network commentator.
Rachel Barkow, NYU Assistant Law Professor. Before joining NYU, Barkow was an associate at the Washington, D.C., firm of Kellogg, Huber, Hansen, Todd & Evans, where she focused on telecommunications and administrative law issues in proceedings before the Federal Communications Commission, state regulatory agencies, and federal and state courts. She took a leave from the firm during 2001 to serve as the John M. Olin Fellow in Law at Georgetown University Law Center. Her main academic interests are administrative and criminal law, and she is especially interested in how the lessons of administrative law can be applied to the administration of criminal justice. Barkow has written several articles, including “More Supreme than Court: The Fall of the Political Question Doctrine and the Rise of Judicial Supremacy,” which appeared in the Columbia Law Review (2002). After graduating from Northwestern University (B.A. 1993), Barkow attended Harvard Law School (J.D. 1996), where she won the Sears Prize, which is awarded annually to two students with the top overall grade averages in the first-year class. Barkow served as a law clerk to Judge Laurence H. Silberman on the District of Columbia Circuit, and Justice Antonin Scalia on the U.S. Supreme Court.
NYU Law School’s Center on Law and Security (CLS) is a research and policy center that studies the legal dimensions of security and counter terrorism at national and international levels. The CLS brings together experts, practitioners and policymakers in a series of colloquia, roundtables, conferences and publications. The CLS receives partial funding from NYU’s Center for Catastrophe Preparedness and Response.