Chicago Humanities Festival Dives Deep with Series On Free Speech

Chicago Humanities Festival is announcing a three-part deep dive series curated and hosted by legal scholar Geoffrey Stone (Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor of Law at University of Chicago) exploring debates around the First Amendment.

"This three-part series will bring audiences almost a mini-course on free speech featuring an array of brilliant thinkers, brought together by constitutional expert Geoffrey Stone," says Chicago Humanities Festival's Marilynn Thoma Artistic Director Alison Cuddy. "American public and political discourse is changing under the growing influence of an array of forces, from Big Tech companies to racial and social justice movements, and that's leading many to reflect on First Amendment rights. We decided to devote more than one program to the discussion to give audiences the space to engage deeply with this topic and, we hope, renew conversations in our community about the limits and possibilities of free speech."

This series will run this spring and explore some of the most urgent facets of this debate: freedom of the press and national security, the role of social media, and hate speech.

First up is a live-streaming discussion about national security and freedom of the press on Tuesday, March 31st starting at 7:00 PM. A central question of democracy is how to balance a government's need to conduct national security operations in secret with the public's right to know what their government is doing. The answer-debated to this day-is both a complex policy judgment and an equally complex judgment about the meaning of the First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and the press. Geoffrey Stone (coauthor of National Security, Leaks, and Freedom of the Press) will be joined by two of the book's contributors, former director of the CIA John Brennan and Washington Post national security reporter Ellen Nakashima, to discuss secrecy, disclosure, security, and the First Amendment.

Learn more at https://www.chicagohumanities.org/events/national-security-press-freedom/