Former ACLU president to speak at Sweet Briar on March 23

Nadine Strossen will speak at Sweet Briar on March 23.


Nadine Strossen, who served as president of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1991 to 2008 — the first woman and youngest person to ever hold that post — will speak at Sweet Briar College at 4:30 p.m. Saturday, March 23. The event will be held in Josey Dining Room in Prothro Hall and is free and open to the public.

Strossen has written, taught and advocated extensively in the areas of constitutional law and civil liberties. She has visited more than 500 campuses and has commented frequently on legal issues in the national media, having appeared on virtually every national news program. She has been a monthly columnist for two online publications and a weekly commentator on the Talk America Radio Network.

She currently serves as the John Marshall Harlan II Professor of Law at New York Law School and is a member of the ACLU’s National Advisory Council, as well as the Advisory Boards of EPIC (Electronic Privacy Information Center), FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) and Heterodox Academy. She is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.



Strossen is the author of several books, including her most recent: “HATE: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship.” University of Chicago Law Professor Geoffrey Stone, a noted First Amendment expert, wrote in his foreword to the book, “Strossen stakes out a bold and important claim about how best to protect both equality and freedom … No one can address this issue in the foreseeable future without taking on this formidable and compelling analysis. It lays the foundation for all debates on this issue for years to come.”

In 2017, the American Bar Association presented Strossen with the Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement Award. She’s been acknowledged as one of the top 100 influential women by Vanity Fair and as one of the 100 most influential lawyers in America by The National Law Journal. Working Woman Magazine listed her among the “350 Women Who Changed the World.”

She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard College and magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, where she was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. Before becoming a law professor, she practiced law for nine years in her hometown of Minneapolis and New York City.

Following her talk, guests are invited to stay and have dinner with Strossen. The guest rate for dinner is $9.50 for adults and $5.50 for children 11 and younger. More information is at sbc.edu/dining-services.

After dinner, guests are invited to enjoy Sweet Briar Theatre’s performance of “The Importance of Being Earnest” at 7:30 p.m. in Murchison Lane Auditorium in the Babcock Fine Arts Center. Tickets are $10 for adults, $7 for seniors, $5 for non-SBC students and free for the Sweet Briar community.

For more information about Strossen’s lecture, please email Josh Wheeler at jwheeler@sbc.edu.