The colloquium on "Civil Liberties in the 21st Century" will
continue on
Wednesday, Oct. 7, with a talk by legal
historian and constitutional scholar
Joyce Lee Malcolm,
titled "To Heller and Back: Is There a Right of
Self-Defense?".
The lecture will take place at
7:30 p.m. in
Wilde Auditorium. The event is free and open to
the public, but
tickets are required. For tickets, please
call the University box office at 860.768.4228 or
800.274.8587.
Malcolm's talk is the second event in the
"Civil
Liberties in the 21st Century Community Conversations
Colloquium". The colloquium began on Sept. 23 with a panel
discussion on capital punishment in Connecticut. The series will
include six invited lectures and panel discussions, to be held
throughout the 2009-10 academic year.
Malcolm's talk will focus on
District of Columbia v.
Heller, a landmark case in which the U.S. Supreme Court held
that the Second Amendment to the Constitution protects a citizen's
right to possess a firearm for legal purposes, such as self-defense
within the home.
Malcolm is a professor of legal history at George Mason University
School of Law and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She
previously served as director of the Division of Research Programs
at the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her areas of
expertise include constitutional and legal history; constitutional
law; the rights of the individual versus the rights of the state;
and crime, violence, and public policy.
Malcolm has published scores of scholarly articles, book chapters,
and essays, in addition to seven books. Her book,
To Keep and
Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right (1994), has
been cited with approval in U.S. Supreme Court decisions, including
several times in the landmark case,
District of Columbia v.
Heller (2008).
Her book
Guns and Violence: The English Experience (2002)
has been widely discussed in both scholarly journals and the
popular media. Malcolm's most recent book,
Peter's War: A New
England Slave Boy and the American Revolution, published by
Yale University Press early this year, has been nominated for the
Pulitzer Prize.
For more information on Malcolm, visit
www.joyceleemalcolm.com.
The next program in the colloquium will be a
Nov. 4 talk on
"Civil Liberties and Economic Democracy" by
Michael
Parenti, the author of 21 books and hundreds of articles on
politics, culture, economics, and history.
The "Civil Liberties in the 21st Century Community Conversations
Colloquium" is sponsored by the
Rogow Distinguished Visiting
Lecturers Program and the
Office of the Provost. The
members of the colloquium planning committee are
Jilda Aliotta,
Mary Dowst, Marcia Moen, Katie Roy '09, Paul Siegel, and
Donn Weinholtz.
