Constitutional Hope:

David Cole

David Cole is a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, a volunteer staff attorney for the Center for Constitutional Rights, the legal affairs correspondent for The Nation, and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books. He is the author of six books. His first book, No Equal Justice: Race and Class in the American Criminal Justice System, was named Best Non-Fiction Book of 1999 by the Boston Book Review, and best book on an issue of national policy in 1999 by the American Political Science Association. Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism received the American Book Award in 2004. His most recent book, published in 2009, is The Torture Memos: Rationalizing the Unthinkable.

He has litigated many significant constitutional cases in the Supreme Court, including Texas v. Johnson and United States v. Eichman, which extended First Amendment protection to flagburning, National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley, which challenged political content restriction on NEA funding, and Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, which challenged a federal law that makes it a crime to advocate for peace and human rights if done to or for a group designated as “terrorist.” Since 9/11, he has been involved in many of the nation’s most important cases involving civil liberties and national security.

New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis has called David “one of the country’s great legal voices for civil liberties today,” and Nat Hentoff has called him “a one-man Committee of Correspondence in the tradition of patriot Sam Adams.” David has received numerous awards for his human rights work, including from the Society of American Law Teachers, the National Lawyers Guild, the ACLU of Southern California, the ABA Section on Individual Rights and Responsibilities, and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.