12 p.m., Friday, November 9, 2012
Marlyn E. Lugar Courtroom
WVU Law Center
The West Virginia University College of Law with the support of the C. Edwin Baker family have established a lecture to honor the legacy of the late C. Edwin Baker, the former Nicholas F. Gallicchio Professor of Law and Communication at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
The West Virginia University College of Law wishes to thank the Baker Family for their generosity and the trust that they express in their decision to endow a lecture and house the collected works of C. Edwin Baker in the George R. Farmer, Jr. Law Library at the College of Law. We are honored to be asked to provide a home for this significant body of work preserving this legacy for current and future legal scholars.
The Program
11 A.M.
OPENING EXHIBITION RECEPTION
WVU Law Center Lobby
12 P.M.
Introduction
Marlyn E. Lugar Courtroom
Joyce E. McConnell
The William J. Maier, Jr. Dean and
Thomas R. Goodwin Professor of Law,
West Virginia University College of Law
A Feminist Vision of Free Speech Theory
Marlyn E. Lugar Courtroom
SUSAN H. WILLIAMS
Walter W. Foskett Professor of Law,
Indiana University Maurer School of Law
A Q&A session will follow the speaker.
Items from the C. Edwin Baker Collection will be on exhibit in
the WVU Law Center Lobby from 11 a.m. until 2 p.m.
The Lecture
A Feminist Vision of Free Speech Theory
In this lecture, Prof. Williams will draw on inspiration from Professor C. Edwin Baker’s work on free speech theory to develop a feminist understanding of autonomy that can ground a new approach to the first amendment. She will highlight the themes in Prof. Baker’s work that connect to this project and will describe the ways in which a feminist vision of autonomy both grows out of and differs from Prof. Baker’s own autonomy theory. She will also offer some thoughts about the implications of the feminist approach for some of the most controversial current issues in first amendment jurisprudence: commercial speech regulation, hate speech, and political campaign finance regulation.
Susan H. Williams
Susan H. Williams is the Walter W. Foskett Professor of Law and the Director of the Center for Constitutional Democracy at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law. Prof. Williams graduated from Harvard Law School, where she served as the Supervising Editor of the Harvard Law Review. She then clerked for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was, at that time, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Her scholarship focuses on issues of gender equality, freedom of speech, and constitutional design. She has written many articles and is the author or editor of three books: Truth, Autonomy, and Speech: Feminist Theory and the First Amendment (NYU Press 2004), Constituting Equality: Gender Equality and Comparative Constitutional Law (Cambridge University Press 2009) (paperback version 2011), and Difference and Constitutionalism in Pan Asia (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2013). She has been a visiting fellow at Cambridge University and at the European University Institute (Italy) and a visiting faculty member at the University of Paris II (Pantheon-Assas). For the past ten years, Prof. Williams has been bringing the world of scholarship together with the world of social action, by advising constitutional reformers, including women’s organizations, in several countries around the world. She has acted as a constitutional advisor to the Women’s League of Burma, the Association of Female Lawyers of Liberia, and Women4Libya, among others. In this capacity, she leads workshops and helps draft proposed constitutional language. She is currently involved in advising the democracy movement in Burma, the governments of Liberia and South Sudan, and civil society organizations in Vietnam and Libya.