Speakers Address Civil Rights, Domestic Violence, and Tort Reform

REPORTED BY KELLY CRESAP, JENNY CIEPLAK (2L), MATT DALTON (2L), JIM GRUBER (3L), AND KATIE TENNEY (1L)

Once again in fall 2003, student organizations brought notable speakers to campus, sparking debate on current issues and enriching the intellectual climate. In October, the American Constitution Society welcomed Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL) to deliver its annual keynote address on Congress and the courts. Durbin’s lecture, titled “The Right Wing Agenda–Can Our Court System Survive?” was a clarion protest against Republican-based efforts to prevent Democrats

ACLU President Nadine Strossen

from obstructing confirmation of the more conservative and activist judicial nominees. Another ACS-sponsored event in October was a vigorous discussion of the Second Amendment by panelists that included Bob Levy, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute; Daniel Vice of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence; Mathew Nosanchuk of the Violence Policy Center; and Tim O’Toole, a District of Columbia public defender.
     In November, the ACS hosted Nadine Strossen, president of the American Civil Liberties Union, who spoke of the challenges facing the ACLU in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks. The civil rights concerns of Muslims today, Strossen said, parallel those of African-Americans in the 1960s. Although she praised the current Supreme Court’s continuing efforts to protect free speech, Strossen also worried that the government’s current methods of infiltrating mosques are similar to those it used against African-American churches during the 1960s.
     In September, Professor Linda G. Mills, who teaches social work and law at NYU, addressed the issue of domestic violence, in an event jointly sponsored by the Women’s Legal Alliance, the Women of Color Collective, and the Georgetown Domestic Violence Clinic. Mills warned her audience that the current system of mandatory reporting and arrest actually may deter many abuse victims from coming forward.
     In October, the Federalist Society hosted a debate on tort class action reform featuring field experts and Law Center adjunct professors Kenneth Feinberg and Michael Horowitz, and moderated by Professor Heidi Li Feldman. Feinberg serves as special master of the September 11 Victim Compensation Fund, and Horowitz
directs the Hudson Institute’s Project for Civil Justice Reform. Feinberg argued that calls for mass tort reform are misdirected and suggested that the issue might be better handled at the state level rather than federally. In his rebuttal, Horowitz charged that the political process is better-suited for redistributing wealth than tort litigation is, since politicians must respond to multiple constituencies.
     In November, the International Law Society, the ACS, and Phi Delta Phi sponsored a panel titled “From Rome to the Congo: Implications of the International Criminal Court.” Professor David Luban moderated. Panelists included Visiting Professor David Scheffer, former U.S. Ambassador at Large for War Crimes Issues, and Jerry Fowler, staff director of the Committee on Conscience at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. The panelists discussed the extent to which efforts to support a permanent international court for treating war crimes and genocide may or may not have been hampered by the United States’ decision not to sign on to the court, which presently includes 92 other countries.