Events

Free speech is under attack at colleges and universities today, with critics on and off campus challenging the value of open inquiry and freewheeling intellectual debate. Too often speakers are shouted down, professors are threatened, and classes are disrupted. Constitutional scholar Keith E. Whittington argues that universities must protect and encourage free speech because vigorous free speech is the lifeblood of the university. Without free speech, a university cannot fulfill its most basic, fundamental, and essential purposes, including to foster freedom of thought, ideological diversity, and tolerance.
 

Examining such hot-button issues as trigger warnings, safe spaces, hate speech, disruptive protests, speaker disinvitations, the use of social media by faculty, and academic politics, Speak Freely describes the dangers of empowering campus censors to limit speech and enforce orthodoxy. It explains why free speech and civil discourse are at the heart of the university’s mission of creating and nurturing an open and diverse community dedicated to learning. It shows why universities must make space for voices from both the left and right. And it points out how a better understanding of why the university lives or dies by free speech can help guide everyone—including students, faculty, administrators, and alumni—faced with difficult challenges such as unpopular, hateful, or dangerous speech.

Timely and vitally important, Speak Freely demonstrates why universities can succeed only by fostering more free speech, more free thought—and a greater tolerance for both.

One of our most important federal civil rights statutes allows individuals to sue state and local officials who violate their constitutional rights. This remedy is crucial not just to secure relief for individual claimants whose rights are violated, but also to ensure accountability and professionalism in law enforcement.

But the Supreme Court has created a major hurdle for civil rights plaintiffs through the judge-made doctrine of “qualified immunity.” This doctrine holds that law enforcement officers will be shielded from liability for unlawful misconduct unless the plaintiff can show that the officer violated “clearly established law.” The courts have aggressively applied this standard to require not just a clear legal rule but also a prior case with functionally similar facts. The end result is that police may get away with egregious unlawful conduct simply because no case already on the books has the same fact pattern.

Please join us for a forum marking the beginning of Cato’s campaign to challenge and roll back qualified immunity, as our distinguished panel discusses the law and history of the doctrine, its effect on civil rights litigation, and the implications for police accountability.

Over the past 25 years, more than 2,000 individuals have been exonerated in the United States after being wrongfully convicted of crimes they did not commit. There is good reason to believe that tens or even hundreds of thousands more languish in American prisons today.

How this can happen unfolds in the riveting new book from Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington. The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist recounts the story of two Mississippi doctors—Dr. Steven Hayne, a medical examiner, and Dr. Michael West, a dentist—who built successful careers as the go-to experts for prosecutors and whose actions led many innocent defendants to land in prison. Some of the convictions then began to fall apart, including those of two innocent men who spent a combined 30 years in prison before being exonerated in 2008.

Balko and Carrington reveal how Mississippi officials propelled West and Hayne to the top of the state’s criminal justice apparatus and then, through institutional failures and structural racism, empowered these two “experts” to produce countless flawed convictions on bad evidence and bogus science. Please join us for a conversation about the book and the broader lessons we can learn about criminal justice in our country.