Newswise — EVANSTON, Ill. --- David D. Cole, the national legal director of the ACLU, will discuss the role of civil society in advancing and defending liberty in “perilous times” when he delivers the 28th annual Richard W. Leopold Lecture at Northwestern University.

The lecture, “We’ll See You in Court: The Defense of Liberty in the Era of Trump,” will take place at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 24 at Cahn Auditorium, 600 Emerson St., on the Evanston campus.

The event is free and open to the public. However, tickets are required.

Media planning to cover the discussion must contact Hilary Hurd Anyaso at office 847-491-4887, mobile 571-278-0765 or [email protected], by Friday, Oct. 20.

Media rules:

  • No video recording or photography is allowed.
  • Media may obtain photos from designated University photographer.

In his role as national legal director, Cole directs a program that includes approximately 1,400 state and federal lawsuits on a broad range of civil liberties issues. He manages 100 ACLU staff attorneys in the organization’s New York headquarters, oversees the ACLU’s U.S. Supreme Court docket and provides leadership to more than 200 staff attorneys who work in ACLU affiliate offices in all 50 states, Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. Another 1,700 volunteer cooperating attorneys throughout the country are engaged in ACLU litigation. With an annual headquarters budget of $140 million and more than 1.2 million members, the ACLU is the nation’s largest and oldest civil liberties organization.

Cole has litigated many constitutional cases before the Supreme Court, including Texas v. Johnson and United States v. Eichman, which extended First Amendment protection to flag burning; National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley, which challenged political content restriction on NEA funding; and Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, which challenged a federal statute that, under the guise of prohibiting “material support” to terrorist groups, makes it a crime to advocate for peace and human rights.

Cole’s victories include: successfully defending for over 21 years a group of Palestinian immigrants whom the government sought to deport for their political affiliations; challenging restrictions on federally funded AIDS education; obtaining an injunction against Randall Terry and Operation Rescue for blocking access to abortion providers; and freeing several Arab and Muslim immigrants detained on secret evidence. Cole, who began his career at the Center for Constitutional Rights, litigated many of these cases in cooperation with ACLU attorneys across the country.

Cole is on leave from Georgetown University, where he has taught constitutional law and criminal justice since 1990, and is the Hon. George J. Mitchell Professor in Law and Public Policy. Cole writes regularly for The Nation, New York Review of Books, Washington Post and many other periodicals. He is the author or editor of 10 books. “Less Safe, Less Free: Why America Is Losing the War on Terror,” published in 2007, and co-authored with Jules Lobel, won the Palmer Civil Liberties Prize for best book on national security and civil liberties. “Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism” received the American Book Award in 2004. Cole’s first book, “No Equal Justice: Race and Class in the American Criminal Justice System,” is one of the first to examine the ways that the criminal justice system exploits and exacerbates racial disparities. It was named Best Non-Fiction Book of 1999 by the Boston Book Review. His most recent book, “Engines of Liberty: The Power of Citizen Activists to Make Constitutional Law,” published in 2016, examines the strategies civil society organizations employ to change constitutional law.

The late New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis called Cole “one of the country’s great legal voices for civil liberties today,” and the late Nat Hentoff called him “a one-man Committee of Correspondence in the tradition of patriot Sam Adams.” Cole has received two honorary degrees and many awards for his civil liberties and human rights work, including, in 2013, the inaugural Normen Dorsen Presidential Prize from the ACLU, awarded to an academic for lifetime commitment to civil liberties.