David Cole

David Cole is the National Legal Director of the ACLU and a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, a volunteer attorney for the Center for Constitutional Rights, the legal affairs correspondent for The Nation, and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books. He is the author of seven books, and his books have received multiple awards, including the American Book Award for Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism.

He has litigated many significant constitutional cases in the Supreme Court, including Texas v. Johnson and the United States v. Eichman, which extended First Amendment protection to flag-burning; National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley, which challenged political content restriction on NEA funding; and most recently, Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, which challenged the constitutionality of the statute prohibiting “material support” to terrorist groups, which makes speech advocating peace and human rights a crime.

New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis has called David “one of the country’s great legal voices for civil liberties today,” and Nat Hentoff has called him “a one-man Committee of Correspondence in the tradition of patriot Sam Adams.” David has received numerous awards for his human rights work, including most recently the inaugural Norman Dorsen Prize from the ACLU for a lifetime commitment to civil liberties.