Constitutional scholar Jeffrey Rosen named Fiscus Lecturer
Jeffrey Rosen
“The Future of Privacy and Free Speech: Translating the Constitution in the Age of Google Glass and Wikileaks” is the title of the 2013 Ronald J. Fiscus Lecture at Skidmore College, to be presented Friday, Nov. 1, by Jeffrey Rosen, president and chief executive officer of the National Constitution Center.
Free and open to the public, the talk begins at 8 p.m. Nov. 1 in Gannett Auditorium, Palamountain Hall.
The National Constitution Center is the first and only non-profit, non-partisan institution devoted to what it calls “the most powerful vision of freedom ever expressed: the U.S. Constitution.” Located across from Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, the center is an interactive museum, national town hall, and headquarters for civic education that engages millions of citizens.
Rosen was named to the center’s top post in May. He was an adviser to the center during its early planning phases and was a visiting scholar during the summer of 2003.
He is also a professor at the George Washington University Law School, where he has taught since 1977, and is the legal affairs editor of The New Republic. He is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, where he explores issues involving the future of technology and the Constitution.
A highly regarded journalist, Rosen has contributed essays and commentaries to The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, on National Public Radio, and The New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer. The Chicago Tribune named him one of the 10 best magazine journalists in America and a reviewer for The Los Angeles Times called him “the nation’s most widely read and influential legal commentator.” He received the 2012 Golden Pen Award from the Legal Writing Institute for his “extraordinary contribution to the cause of better legal writing.”
His books include The Supreme Court: The Personalities and Rivalries that Defined America; The Most Democratic Branch: How the courts Serve America; The Naked Crowd: Reclaiming Security and Freedom in an Anxious Age; and The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America.
Rosen is a graduate of Harvard College; Oxford University, where he was a Marshall Scholar; and Yale Law School.
Skidmore’s Fiscus Lecture was inaugurated in 1991 by the College’s Department of Government to honor the late Ronald J. Fiscus, a Skidmore faculty member from 1980 to his death in 1990. Professor Fiscus was a constitutional law specialist and a key contributor to the development of a minor in law and society at Skidmore.
