The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit legal advocacy organization specializing in civil rights and public interest litigation. Based in Montgomery, Alabama, it is known for its legal cases against white supremacist groups, its classification of hate groups and other extremist organizations, and for promoting tolerance education programs. The SPLC was founded by Morris Dees, Joseph J. Levin Jr., and Julian Bond in 1971 as a civil rights law firm in Montgomery, Alabama. Bond served as president of the board between 1971 and 1979.
Anne Elizabeth Applebaum is an American journalist and historian. She has written extensively about Marxism–Leninism and the development of civil society in Central and Eastern Europe.
David Cay Boyle Johnston is an American investigative journalist and author, a specialist in economics and tax issues, and winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Beat Reporting.
Allan Jay Lichtman is an American historian who has taught at American University in Washington, D.C. since 1973.
The Montgomery Advertiser is a daily newspaper and news website located in Montgomery, Alabama. It was founded in 1829.
Geoffrey R. Stone is an American law professor and noted First Amendment scholar. He is currently the Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School.
Adam Seth Cohen is an American journalist, author, lawyer, and former assistant editorial page editor of The New York Times. He also works in the administration of New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio.
Pamela Susan Karlan is an American legal scholar who is the principal deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice. She is on a leave of absence from Stanford Law School. A leading legal scholar on voting rights and constitutional law, she previously served as U.S. Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Voting Rights in the DOJ's Civil Division from 2014 to 2015.
Barry E. Friedman is an American academic and one of the country's leading authorities on constitutional law, policing, criminal procedure, and federal courts, working at the intersections of law, politics and history. Friedman teaches a variety of courses including Judicial Decisionmaking, Federal Courts and the Federal System, and Criminal Procedure: Fourth and Fifth Amendments, as well as a seminar on Democratic Policing. He writes about judicial review, constitutional law and theory, federal jurisdiction, judicial behavior, and policing. His scholarship appears regularly in the nation's top law and peer-edited reviews.
Cyber Rights: Defending Free speech in the Digital Age is a non-fiction book about cyberlaw, written by free speech lawyer Mike Godwin. It was first published in 1998 by Times Books. It was republished in 2003 as a revised edition by The MIT Press. Godwin graduated from the University of Texas School of Law in 1990 and was the first staff counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Written with a first-person perspective, Cyber Rights offers a background in the legal issues and history pertaining to free speech on the Internet. It documents the author's experiences in defending free speech online, and puts forth the thesis that "the remedy for the abuse of free speech is more speech". Godwin emphasizes that decisions made about the expression of ideas on the Internet affect freedom of speech in other media as well, as granted by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Free Speech, "The People's Darling Privilege": Struggles for Freedom of Expression in American History is a non-fiction book about the history of freedom of speech in the United States written by Michael Kent Curtis and published in 2000 by Duke University Press. The book discusses the evolution of free speech in the U.S. within the context of the actions of individuals and how they affected change. The author writes that protests and actions by citizens helped to evolve the notions surrounding free speech in the U.S. before definitive statements on the matter from U.S. courts. Curtis writes that free speech rights were first developed in "the forum of public opinion", and that, "The history of free speech shows the need for broadly protective free speech rules applied generally and equally".
Kathryn Schulz is an American journalist and author. She is a staff writer at The New Yorker. In 2016, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for her article on the risk of a major earthquake and tsunami in the Pacific Northwest
Scribes-- The American Society of Legal Writers -- is an organization dedicated to encouraging legal writers and improving legal writing throughout the entire legal community: in court, in the law office, in the publishing house, and in law school. Founded in 1953, Scribes is the oldest organization of its kind. Scribes has almost 2,700 members, including state and federal judges, practicing lawyers, law-school deans and professors, and legal editors. Since 2017, its executive office has been located in Chicago, Illinois at UIC John Marshall Law School (Chicago). From 2015 to 2017, it was located in Lubbock, Texas at Texas Tech University, and before that, it was located in Michigan at Western Michigan University Cooley Law School. The executive director is Philip Johnson.
Adam Winkler is the Connell Professor of law at the UCLA School of Law. He is the author of We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights, which was a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award for Nonfiction. He has been ranked as one of twenty most cited legal scholars in judicial opinions, including landmark Supreme Court cases on the First and Second Amendments. He is also the author of Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America, and is a frequent commentator on legal issues.
Sex, Sin, and Blasphemy: A Guide to America's Censorship Wars is a non-fiction book by lawyer and civil libertarian Marjorie Heins that is about freedom of speech and the censorship of works of art in the early 1990s by the U.S. government. The book was published in 1993 by The New Press. Heins provides an overview of the history of censorship, including the 1873 Comstock laws, and then moves on to more topical case studies of attempts at suppression of free expression.
Kevin Michael Kruse is an American historian. He is professor of history at Princeton University. His research interests include the political, social, and urban/suburban history of 20th-century America, with a particular focus on the making of modern conservatism. Outside of academia, Kruse has attracted substantial attention and following for his Twitter threads where he provides historical context and applies historical research to current political events.
Nancy K. MacLean is an American historian. She is the William H. Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University. MacLean's research focuses on race, gender, labor history and social movements in 20th century U.S. history, with particular attention to the U.S. South.
How Democracies Die is a 2018 comparative politics book by Harvard University political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt about how elected leaders can gradually subvert the democratic process to increase their power. In 2021, The Economist described the book as the "most important book of the Trump era." The book, which offers stark warnings about the impact of the Republican Party and Donald Trump's presidency on U.S. democracy, influenced Joe Biden prior to his decision to run for president in the 2020 presidential election.
Nancy D. Polikoff is an American law professor, LGBT rights activist, and author. She is a professor emerita at Washington College of Law. Polikoff's work focuses on LGBT rights, family law, and gender identity issues. She authored Beyond Marriage: Valuing All Families under the Law (2008).
The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America is a 2017 book by Richard Rothstein on the history of racial segregation in the United States. The book documents the history of state sponsored segregation stretching back to the late 1800s and exposes racially discriminatory policies put forward by most presidential administrations in that time, including liberal presidents like Franklin Roosevelt. The author argues that intractable segregation in America is the byproduct of explicit government policies at the local, state, and federal levels, also known as de jure segregation — and not happenstance, or de facto segregation. Among other discussions, the book provides a history of subsidized housing and discusses the phenomenons of white flight, blockbusting, and racial covenants, and their role in housing segregation. Rothstein wrote the book while serving as a research associate for the Economic Policy Institute, where he is now a Distinguished Fellow.
