National ACLU president Susan N. Herman will deliver the IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law/Roy C. Palmer Civil Liberties Prize Lecture April 11
Taking Liberties: The War on Terror and the Erosion of American Democracy
Brooklyn Law School professor and ACLU president Susan N. Herman will discuss her award-winning book Taking Liberties: The War on Terror and the Erosion of American Democracy (Oxford University Press 2011) at the 2012 IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law/Roy C. Palmer Civil Liberties Prize Lecture. The program is free and open to the public. The lecture will begin at noon on April 11 in the law school's Judge Abraham Lincoln Marovitz Courtroom, 565 West Adams Street (between Clinton and Jefferson streets) in Chicago.
In Taking Liberties: The War on Terror and the Erosion of American Democracy, Professor Herman examines the human and social costs of the War on Terror. A decade after the September 11 attacks on the United States, Professor Herman says "[I]t is far from clear that the government's hastily adopted antiterrorist tactics—such as the Patriot Act—are keeping us safe, but it is increasingly clear that these emergency measures in fact have the potential to ravage our lives—and have already done just that to countless Americans."
A member of the Brooklyn Law School since 1980, Professor Susan N. Herman currently is the Centennial Professor of Law. Professor Herman teaches courses in Constitutional Law and Criminal Procedure and seminars on Law and Literature and on Terrorism and Civil Liberties. She has written extensively on constitutional and criminal procedure issues for scholarly and other publications. Professor Herman is editor and co-author (with Paul Finkelman) of Terrorism, Government, and Law: National Authority and Local Autonomy in the War on Terror (Praeger Security International 2008) and The Right to a Speedy and Public Trial (Praeger 2006).
In 2008, Professor Herman was elected president of the American Civil Liberties Union after having served on the organization's national board of directors for twenty years, as a member of the executive committee for sixteen years, and as general counsel for ten years. She has also participated in Supreme Court litigation, writing and collaborating on amicus curiae briefs for the ACLU on a range of constitutional criminal procedure issues, and conducting Supreme Court moot courts, and in some federal lobbying efforts.
Professor Herman completed her undergraduate education at Barnard College and earned her J.D. from New York University School of Law. Before entering teaching, Professor Herman was Pro Se law clerk for the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and staff attorney and then associate director of Prisoners' Legal Services of New York.
Benefactor Roy C. Palmer, a lawyer and real estate developer, is a 1962 honors graduate of IIT Chicago-Kent and a member of its board of overseers. He and his wife, Susan, are active in numerous civic, social and philanthropic organizations.
The IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law/Roy C. Palmer Civil Liberties Prize was established to encourage and reward public debate among scholars on current issues affecting the rights of individuals and the responsibilities of governments throughout the world. Previous prize recipients include David D. Cole and Jules L. Lobel for their book Less Safe, Less Free: Why America Is Losing the War on Terror (The New Press), Harold H. Bruff for Bad Advice: Bush's Lawyers in the War on Terror (University Press of Kansas), Scott M. Matheson, Jr., for Presidential Constitutionalism in Perilous Times (Harvard University Press), Gabriella Blum and Philip B. Heymann for Laws, Outlaws, and Terrorists: Lessons from the War on Terrorism (Harvard University Press), and Laura A. Dickinson for Outsourcing War and Peace: Preserving Public Values in a World of Privatized Foreign Affairs (Yale University Press).
Founded in 1888, IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law is celebrating "125 years of distinctive legal education." IIT Chicago-Kent is the law school of Illinois Institute of Technology, a private, Ph.D.-granting institution with programs in engineering, psychology, architecture, business, design and law.
