Lecture to explore oversight of free speech in era of mobile technology

Today, lawyers at Google, Facebook and Twitter have more power over who can speak and who can be heard than any king, president or Supreme Court justice, according to a constitutional law expert.

“But American protections for free speech are being strenuously resisted in Europe and the Middle East, where there are growing pressures to ban group libel and other speech that offends the dignity of religious and ethnic groups,” said Jeffrey Rosen, a professor at The George Washington University Law School.

Rosen will give the inaugural Jurimetrics Lecture, “The Deciders v. The First Amendment: Regulating Global Free Speech in an Age of Mobile Technology?”, on Feb. 1, at the College of Law. The free lecture, hosted by the College’s Center for Law, Science & Innovation, will begin at 5 p.m. in room 114 of Armstrong Hall, on the ASU Tempe campus.

Rosen will explore how the Deciders can reconcile their obligation to enforce national laws about speech with a determination to keep the Internet free and open.

Rosen, legal affairs editor at The New Republic, is the author of “The Supreme Court: The Personalities and Rivalries that Defined America” and “The Most Democratic Branch,” among other books. His areas of expertise are constitutional law, criminal procedure, privacy issues and privacy of cyberspace.

To RSVP for the lecture, email Deborah.Relph@asu.edu.

Jurimetrics: The Journal of Law, Science, and Technology is the quarterly journal of the American Bar Association’s Section of Science & Technology. Housed at the College of Law, it is the oldest and most widely circulated publication in its field.