September 7, 2011 "The Supreme Court and Free Speech" Is Subject of Sept. 16 Lecture by Slate Magazine's Dahlia Lithwick

Dahlia Lithwick of Slate Magazine will deliver a lecture titled “The Supreme Court and Free Speech” at the Library of Congress at 4 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 16. The event will be held in Madison Hall, located on the ground floor of the Library’s James Madison Building at 101 Independence Ave. S.E., Washington, D.C. Sponsored by the Law Library of Congress, the lecture is free and open to the public. Tickets are not required.

The lecture will explore the implications of the Supreme Court’s conflicts over free speech issues and how the press and the public contribute to the court’s divisiveness.

Lithwick is a senior editor and legal correspondent at Slate Magazine, where she writes the “Supreme Court Dispatches” and “Jurisprudence” columns. She is also a biweekly columnist for Newsweek. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, ELLE, The Washington Post, The New Republic and the Ottawa Citizen, among other media outlets. She was a regular guest on “The Al Franken Show” and has been a guest columnist for the op-ed page of The New York Times.

As a guest on National Public Radio’s newsmagazine “Day to Day,” which is co-produced by Slate.com, Lithwick frequently provides summaries of and commentary on current U.S. Supreme Court cases. She received the Online News Association’s award for online commentary in 2001 and again in 2005, for a series she co-authored on torture. Lithwick was the first online journalist invited to serve on the Steering Committee for The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. She is the co-author of “Me v. Everybody: Absurd Contracts for an Absurd World,” a legal humor book, and "I Will Sing Life: Voices from the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp,” a book about seven children from a camp for children with life-threatening illnesses, funded by the late Paul Newman.

Established by an act of Congress in 1832, the Law Library makes its resources available to members of Congress, the Supreme Court, other branches of the U.S. government and the global legal community, and sustains and preserves a universal collection of law for future generations. With more than 2.6 million volumes, the Law Library contains the world’s largest collection of law books and other resources from all countries and provides online databases and guides to legal information worldwide through its website at www.loc.gov/law/.

Founded in 1800, the Library of Congress is the nation’s oldest federal cultural institution. The Library seeks to spark imagination and creativity and to further human understanding and wisdom by providing access to knowledge through its magnificent collections, programs and exhibitions. Many of the Library’s rich resources can be accessed through its website at www.loc.gov and via interactive exhibitions on a personalized website at myLOC.gov.