Columbia Law School Professors to Speak at Conference on Academic Freedom

New York, Nov. 18, 2009 – The growing trend of courts injecting themselves into the academic world is the subject of a day-long conference Friday co-sponsored by Columbia Law School.

 

The conference, “Freedom, Law, and Academic Inquiry,” will feature remarks by Law School Professor Katherine M. Franke, Director of the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law, and Philip Hamburger, the Maurice and Hilda Friedman Professor of Law, a leading expert on the First Amendment and censorship.

 

Among the featured speakers is legal scholar Stanley Fish, a professor at Florida International University and contributing writer at The New York Times, where he writes the Think Again blog. It featured a post last month on how courts are now less reluctant to steer clear of disputes in academia.

 

“The challenge is to demarcate the area in which professional judgments are to hold sway from the areas in which what goes on in colleges and universities is no different from what goes on elsewhere and is no less subject to legal scrutiny,” Fish wrote.

 

The conference is also sponsored by the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University, and the University’s Department of English and Comparative Literature.

 

The Nov. 20 conference runs from 10:30-5 p.m., and will be held at the Heyman Center, The event is free and open to the public. A full schedule and directions to the Center are available here.

 

Columbia Law School, founded in 1858, stands at the forefront of legal education and of the law in a global society. Columbia Law School joins traditional strengths in international and comparative law, constitutional law, administrative law, business law and human rights law with pioneering work in the areas of intellectual property, digital technology, sexuality and gender, criminal, and environmental law.

 

Visit us at www.law.columbia.edu.