Cambridge launches web pages for conference organized ASU's Weinstein

The Centre for Public Law at Cambridge University, which hosted an international conference organized last year by James Weinstein, a professor at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University, has launched a website with links to the event’s program and resources.

To visit the website, click here.

The event, which the Centre described as a “remarkable interdisciplinary conference,” was titled, “Threats to University, Humanities, and Science.” Held on July 20-23, 2011 in Cambridge and in London at the British Academy, the conference was convened to identify and suggest solutions to various conditions that threaten the core mission of the modern research university and scientific and humanistic investigation.

The conference opened with a public event, “The Humanities Under Threat?,” at which ASU President Michael Crow spoke, together with Jonathan Cole, former Provost and Dean of Faculties of Columbia University; Stefan Collini, Professor in English Literature at the University of Cambridge; Robert Post, Dean of Yale Law School; Martin Rees, former-President of the Royal Society and Master of Trinity College, Cambridge; and Adam Roberts, President of the British Academy and Senior Research Fellow, Department of Politics and International Relations, Oxford University.

Dozens of prominent scholars from the United Kingdom and United States, including Lawrence Krauss, an ASU Foundation Professor and Director of the ASU Origins Project, and ASU Regents’ Professor George Poste, Chief Scientist of the Complex Adaptive Systems Initiative, and Del E. Webb Chair in Health Innovation at ASU, also spoke at the invitation-only workshop sessions.

Joining these ASU luminaries, a distinguished group of workshop participants represented a diverse array of disciplines, including biology, cosmology, history, law, literature, medicine, philosophy, psychology, physics, sociology and theology. Summaries of the presentations, along with an audio recording of the session on “Threats from Libel Law,” are available on the conference resource page.

In addition to the Centre and the British Academy, the conference was sponsored by the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law and the Mayo Clinic, in association with the Royal Society and Centre for Science and Policy, University of Cambridge.

Weinstein is the Amelia Lewis Professor of Constitutional Law, a Faculty Fellow in the Center for Law, Science & Innovation and an Associate Fellow at Cambridge’s Centre for Public Law. His areas of academic interest are Constitutional Law, especially Free Speech, as well as Jurisprudence and Legal History. He is co-editor of Extreme Speech and Democracy (Oxford University Press 2009, paperback edition 2010), and the author of Hate Speech, Pornography and the Radical Attack on Free Speech Doctrine (Westview Press 1999). Weinstein has written numerous articles in law review symposia on a variety of free speech topics, including: free speech theory, obscenity doctrine, institutional review boards, commercial speech, database protection, campaign finance reform, the relationship between free speech and constitutional rights, hate crimes, and campus speech codes.