FOIA at Fifty

Presented at The Eleventh HOPE (2016), July 23, 2016, 3 p.m. (60 minutes)

The Supreme Court has stated that the Freedom of Information Act "defines a structural necessity in a real democracy." On the 50th anniversary of its enactment, now is an opportune moment to reflect on the role FOIA has played in our legal and political system. This conversation will bring together <a href="https://xi.hope.net/speakers.html#Jameel Jaffer">Jameel Jaffer</a> from the ACLU and <a href="https://xi.hope.net/speakers.html#David Pozen">David Pozen</a> from Columbia Law School to consider the past, present, and future of FOIA. They will discuss virtues and drawbacks of the FOIA model, FOIA's relationship with technology and other transparency mechanisms, the effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of FOIA in the national security context in particular, and lessons to learn from foreign and state-level approaches to regulating government openness.

Presenters:

  • David Pozen
    David Pozen is a professor at Columbia Law School. A former special assistant to Senator Edward M. Kennedy and law clerk to Justice John Paul Stevens, he has written widely on government secrecy and on constitutional law and theory. His recent academic articles include "Privacy-Privacy Tradeoffs" (University of Chicago Law Review), "Uncivil Obedience" (Columbia Law Review), and "The Leaky Leviathan: Why the Government Condemns and Condones Unlawful Disclosures of Information" (Harvard Law Review).
  • Jameel Jaffer
    Jameel Jaffer is a deputy legal director of the National ACLU and Director of the ACLU's Center for Democracy, which houses the National ACLU's work relating to free speech, privacy, technology, national security, and international human rights. He has argued cases in multiple appeals courts, as well as in the U.S. Supreme Court, and he has testified before Congress on several occasions concerning issues relating to counterterrorism policy and civil liberties. He co-led the Freedom of Information Act litigation that resulted in the release of the Bush administration's "torture memos". More recently, he led the ACLU's litigation that resulted in the release of some of the Obama administration's "drone memos".

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