September 10, 2012 Slate Magazine's Dahlia Lithwick to Speak at the Library of Congress Sept. 24

Event Commemorates Constitution Day

Press Contact: Audrey Fischer (202) 707-0022
Public Contact: Jeanine Cali (202) 707-4642

Dahlia Lithwick of Slate Magazine will present her view on the Supreme Court’s most noteworthy decisions of its recent term at 4 p.m. on Monday, Sept. 24 in the Mumford Room, located on the sixth floor of the Library’s James Madison Building, 101 Independence Ave. S.E., Washington, D.C. Titled “Supreme Court Review: Election-Year Issues and Highlights of the Last Term,” the lecture will also identify emerging trends on the court and look ahead to the next judicial term.

The lecture is sponsored by the Law Library of Congress in commemoration of Constitution Day. The event, which is made possible with support from the Friends of the Law Library of Congress, is free and open to the public; tickets are not required.

Lithwick is a senior editor and legal correspondent at Slate, where she writes the “Supreme Court Dispatches” and “Jurisprudence” columns. She is also a bi-weekly columnist for Newsweek. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, 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.

As a guest on National Public Radio’s newsmagazine "Day to Day," which is co-produced by Slate.com, 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. 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.

Established by Congress in 2004, Constitution Day is an American federal holiday that recognizes the ratification of the United States Constitution on Sept. 17, 1787, at the Constitutional Convention. Introduced by the late West Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd, the legislation expands the Sept. 17 celebration of Citizenship Day, which President Harry Truman established in 1952, to recognize everyone who had become a U.S. citizen during the previous year. In combining the observances, the act mandates that all publicly funded educational institutions provide programming on the history of the American Constitution on that day.

Established by an act of Congress in 1832, the Law Library makes its resources available to members of Congress, the Supreme Court, other branches of the U.S. government and the global legal community, and sustains and preserves a universal collection of law for future generations. With more than 2.6 million volumes, the Law Library contains the world’s largest collection of law books and other resources from all countries and provides online databases and guides to legal information worldwide through its website at www.loc.gov/law/.

Founded in 1800, the Library of Congress is the nation’s oldest federal cultural institution. The Library seeks to spark imagination and creativity and to further human understanding and wisdom by providing access to knowledge through its magnificent collections, programs, publications and exhibitions. Many of the Library’s rich resources can be accessed through its website at www.loc.gov.

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PR 12-168
2012-09-10
ISSN 0731-3527