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Slate Magazine’s Dahlia Lithwick to Speak at the Library of Congress Tomorrow

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The following is a guest post by Karla Walker, Special Projects Researcher for Collections, Outreach, and Services.

The Law Library of Congress will host Dahlia Lithwick of Slate Magazine this Friday, September 16th at 4 p.m. Lithwick’s lecture titled, The Supreme Court and Free Speech, will explore the implications of the Supreme Court’s conflicts over free speech issues and how the press and the public contribute to the court’s divisiveness. Here is a little more about Lithwick from the event’s press release:

Dahlia Lithwick

Dahlia Lithwick is a senior editor and legal correspondent at Slate Magazine, where she writes the Supreme Court Dispatches and Jurisprudence columns. She is also a biweekly columnist for Newsweek. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, ELLE, The Washington Post, The New Republic and the Ottawa Citizen, among other media outlets. She was a regular guest on The Al Franken Show and has been a guest columnist for the op-ed page of The New York Times.

…Lithwick frequently provides summaries of and commentary on current U.S. Supreme Court cases. She received the Online News Association’s award for online commentary in 2001 and again in 2005, for a series she co-authored on torture. Lithwick was the first online journalist invited to serve on the Steering Committee for The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. She is the co-author of Me v. Everybody: Absurd Contracts for an Absurd World, a legal humor book, and I Will Sing Life: Voices from the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp, a book about seven children from a camp for children with life-threatening illnesses, funded by the late Paul Newman.

Astute and entertaining, Lithwick has also been a guest on NPR’s ever popular weekly news quiz program, Wait, Wait–Don’t Tell Me!

For me, reading her articles or listening to her lectures is like sitting down with an old friend whom you’ve not seen in a while and catching up on everything you’ve missed…and you’ve missed a lot. Fortunately your friend is prepared to regale you by describing the actions of the Court and its Justices in the form of a 5-act Shakespearean play. Clearly, someone has been paying rapt attention.

I initially became interested in Lithwick’s writing in 2001, when she covered the Microsoft anti-trust suit. It never occurred to me that an anti-trust suit could be that interesting or entertaining. She had me with the pointed jibe at the court for making use of the word “edentulous,” and her suggestion that they play “Opinion Bingo” where one earns points for weaving randomly selected words from the dictionary into court opinions. I became an instant Lithwick fan. And I’m not alone in my feeling of fandom either. One Lithwick fan page calls her “the rockingest Supreme Court columnist ever ever ever.” As a member of the We Love Dahlia Lithwick Facebook page, I am inclined to agree.

This event will be held in Madison Hall, located on the first floor of the Library’s James Madison Building at 101 Independence Ave. S.E., Washington, D.C. Sponsored by the Law Library of Congress, the lecture is free and open to the public. Tickets are not required.

Update: The event video was added below.

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