Weinstein organizing Cambridge conference

Professor James Weinstein is organizing and participating in an international conference July 20-23, in London and Cambridge, which is sponsored by the College of Law, the Center for Public Law at the University of Cambridge, Mayo Clinic and the British Academy.

The conference, “Threats to the University, Humanities, and Science,” is aimed at identifying and suggesting solutions to various conditions that threaten the core mission of the modern research university and scientific and humanistic investigation. It will be opened by a public event, “The Humanities Under Threat?,” on July 20 at the British Academy in London, at which ASU President Michael Crow is among the speakers.

The public event will be followed by invitation-only workshop sessions at Cambridge.

Weinstein is among three discussion leaders at the workshop, “Threats to the University,” and also will participate in the “Threats from the Libel Laws” workshop. Dozens of prominent scholars from around the world, 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 are on the program.

Other topics to be discussed are data protection, contracts, freedom of information, miscommunication among scientists and policy-makers, the regulation of biomedical research and ethics committee as applied to social science research.

Weinstein is the Amelia Lewis Professor of Constitutional Law and a Faculty Fellow in the Center for Law, Science & Innovation at the College of Law, and he is 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, Federal Courts, Civil Procedure and Legal History. Weinstein is co-editor of Extreme Speech and Democracy, and has written numerous articles in law review symposia on a variety of free speech topics, including: obscenity doctrine, institutional review boards, commercial speech, database protection, campaign finance reform, the relationship between free speech and other constitutional rights, hate crimes and campus speech codes. He also has written several articles on the history of personal jurisdiction and its implication for modern doctrine.