The State of Free Speech in the U.S.

Discussants:

• David French, Columnist, New York Times

• Nadine Strossen, John Marshall Harlan II Professor of Law Emerita, New York Law School

Moderator:

• Francesca Procaccini, Assistant Professor, Vanderbilt University Law School

David French is a columnist for The New York Times. A graduate of Harvard Law School, David was previously a senior editor at The Dispatch and a contributing writer at The Atlantic. He is a former constitutional litigator and a past president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. David is a New York Times bestselling author, and his most recent book is Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation. David is a former major in the United States Army Reserve and is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom, where he was awarded the Bronze Star.

Nadine Strossen, New York Law School Professor Emerita and Senior Fellow at FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), was national President of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1991 to 2008. An internationally acclaimed free speech scholar and advocate, who regularly addresses diverse audiences and provides media commentary around the world, Strossen is also the Host and Project Consultant for Free To Speak, a 3-hour documentary film series distributed on public television in 2023.

Francesca Procaccini researches and writes about federal courts and constitutional law, particularly First Amendment law. She joined the Vanderbilt Law faculty in 2022 after teaching at Harvard Law School for two years as a Climenko Fellow, where her scholarship focused on constitutional political rights. Before that, she was a fellow with the Yale Law School Information Society Project, where she researched modern applications of First Amendment law to digital political speech and taught courses on free speech law and media law.