CONFIRMED SPEAKERS

Carol Anderson is an associate professor of history at the University of Missouri and has recently completed a fellowship at Harvard University's Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History. She will be joining the faculty at Emory University in January 2009.

Professor Anderson's research and teaching focus on public policy; particularly the ways that domestic and international policies intersect through the issues of race, justice and equality in the United States. She is the author of Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African-American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955 , which was published by Cambridge University Press and awarded both the Gustavus Myers and Myrna Bernath Book Awards. In her forthcoming book, Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941-1960, Professor Anderson uncovers the long-hidden and important role of the nation's most powerful civil rights organization in the fight for the liberation of peoples of color in Africa and Asia.

Her research has garnered substantial fellowships and grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, Ford Foundation, National Humanities Center, Harvard University, and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.

Johanna Blakley is the deputy director of the Norman Lear Center, a research and public policy institute that explores the convergence of entertainment, commerce and society. Based at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, Blakley performs research on a wide variety of topics, including global entertainment, cultural diplomacy, celebrity culture, digital media and intellectual property law. Much of her work addresses the intersection between entertainment and politics: most recently, she conducted a nationwide poll, with Zogby International, on the relationship between political ideology and entertainment preferences. Blakley has guided more than forty manuscripts through the publication process at the Lear Center, including Frank Capra and the Image of the Journalist in American Film, Ready to Share: Fashion & the Ownership of Creativity; Artists, Technology & the Ownership of Creative Content and Warners' War: Propaganda, Politics & Pop Culture in Wartime Hollywood, to which she contributed an essay on propaganda and public diplomacy. She received a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she taught courses on popular culture and twentieth-century literature. Blakley has held a variety of positions within the high-tech industry, including Web producer and digital archivist at Vivendi-Universal Games.

Arthur Chaskalson was appointed by President Nelson Mandela in June 1994 to be the first President of South Africa's new Constitutional Court and was the Chief Justice of South Africa from November 2001 until his retirement in 2005. In 2002 he received the award of Supreme Counsellor of the Baobab [gold], a national honour, for his service to the nation in respect of constitutionalism, human rights and democracy. He is the President of the International Commission of Jurists, was the Chairperson of a committee of senior judges appointed by the United Nations Environmental Programme to promote and develop judicial education on environmental law in all parts of the world, was the first chairperson of the Southern African Judges Commission, an association of the Chief Justices of Southern Africa, and chairs the Eminent Jurists Panel appointed by the International Commission of Jurists to enquire into the impact of terrorism and counter-terrorism on the rule of law, human rights law, and where relevant, international humanitarian law.

From 1978-1993 he was leading counsel in several cases in which challenges were launched by the Legal Resources Centre against the implementation of apartheid laws. He also appeared as counsel on behalf of members of the liberation movements in several major political trials between 1960 and 1994, including the Rivonia Trial in 1963/1964 at which Mr. Nelson Mandela and other leaders of the African National Congress were convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Marc Cohn is a Grammy-winning singer-songwriter, best known for his song "Walking in Memphis " from his eponymous 1991 album Marc Cohn . He has issued three other studio albums to date: The Rainy Season (1993), Burning the Daze (1998), and Join The Parade (2007), a recording that is being called Marc's most accomplished and compelling album to date.

Cohn has translated some of his most complex and private emotions into lyrical song-poetry and then set those words to music of remarkable depth, toughness, and complexity. In doing so, Marc has created a work that is certain to touch a universal chord of memory and feeling.

Lillie Coney, Associate Director with the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), has over 20 years of experience working with a wide range of science and technology issues. Her background includes extensive work in computer systems and technology policy. She also has worked with civil rights and grassroots organizations on issues relating to voting and civil rights.

Coney has testified before the Department of Homeland Security's Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee on domestic surveillance and the topic of CCTV Surveillance and " Fusion Centers ". She has coordinated a campaign on the Department of Defense's database on all youth 16-25 years of age, involving more than 125 organizations.

Coney is the Public Policy Coordinator for the National Committee for Voting Integrity, and also serves as the Coordinator for the Privacy Coalition. The Privacy Coalition has over 40 organizations and affiliates who share a commitment of freedom and privacy rights.

Kimberle Crenshaw is a Professor of Law at UCLA and at Columbia Law School. Writing in the area of civil rights, Black feminist legal theory, race, racism and the law, her articles have appeared in the Harvard Law Review , National Black Law Journal, Stanford Law Review and Southern California Law Review. Professor Crenshaw has lectured widely nationally and internationally on race matters, addressing audiences throughout Europe, Africa and South America. A specialist on race and gender equality, she has facilitated workshops for civil rights activists in Brazil and constitutional court judges in South Africa. As the co-founder and the Executive Director of the African American Policy Forum, she worked extensively to coordinate the "Globalizing Positive Action: A Multinational Research and Development Workshop on Social Integration Discourses," which took place at the Rockefeller Study and Conference Center in Italy. In 2007, Professor Crenshaw was the recipient of the Ira Glasser award and was later named the Fulbright Chair for the Latin American Program in Brazil.

Lucy A. Dalglish is the Executive Director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, a voluntary, unincorporated association of reporters and news editors dedicated to protecting the First Amendment interests of the news media. Based in Arlington, Va., the Reporters Committee has provided research, guidance and representation in major press cases in state and federal courts for 36 years.

Prior to assuming the position in January 2000, she was a media lawyer for almost five years in the trial department of the Minneapolis law firm of Dorsey & Whitney.

Dalglish was awarded the Wells Memorial Key, the highest honor bestowed by the Society of Professional Journalists, in 1995. A year later, she was one of 24 journalists, lawyers, lawmakers, educators, researchers, librarians and historians inducted into the charter class of the National Freedom of Information Act Hall of Fame in Washington, D.C.

Dalglish appears frequently in print and broadcast stories about issues involving the media and the First Amendment. She has given speeches on these issues in recent months before journalists, lawyers, judges and citizen groups in Washington, D.C., New York, Nashville, Reno, Las Vegas, Minneapolis, Chicago , Pittsburgh, Austin, Eugene, Houston, San Diego, Orlando, Honolulu, Seattle, Tacoma, Phoenix, Kansas City and Denver.

David and Tomas de la Torre are twin brothers hailing from a rural county in southern New Mexico. They were plaintiffs in a recent ACLU of New Mexico/MALDEF lawsuit against a New Mexico county Sheriff, arising out of immigration raids conducted by the Sheriff's Department in September 2007. The ACLU-NM and MALDEF maintain the raids were conducted with funds from "Operation Stonegarden," a federal program funding local law enforcement near the border. On September 10, 2007, David and Tomas's family were rousted out of bed in the pre-dawn hours by Sheriff's deputies claiming the family had an "illegal refrigerator" on their porch and other petty allegations. The family was then split apart, with undocumented members being arrested and turned over to Border Patrol and subsequently deported. The lawsuit was settled by the adoption of a policy by the Sheriff not to question immigration status when investigating petty misdemeanors and not to question immigration status at all unless it is specifically relevant to an otherwise valid criminal investigation. The County also paid damages, attorneys' fees and costs to the plaintiffs.

Ariel Dorfman, the Chilean-American author of numerous works of fiction, plays, poems, essays and films in both Spanish and English, has been called a "literary grandmaster" ( Time ) and "one of the greatest living Latin American novelists" ( Newsweek ).  His books have been translated into over 40 languages and have received many international prizes. Among his plays - performed in more than one hundred countries - are Death and the Maiden, which has won dozens of best play awards around the world, including England 's Olivier award for Best Play.

An expatriate from his country, he has been active in the defense of human rights for many decades, having addressed the General Assembly of the United Nations and the main Forum of UNESCO in Paris . As part of this human rights work, he has penned the play Speak Truth to Power: Voices from Beyond the Dark, based upon a book by Kerry Kennedy, which premiered at the Kennedy Center with an all-star cast and which was transmitted by PBS in the United States and is being performed in a number of countries around the world.

He holds the Walter Hines Page Chair of Literature and Latin American Studies at Duke University and writes regularly for many of the most important newspapers and magazines in the U.S. and abroad.

Brendan Egan recently graduated from law school at the University of New Mexico and has served as the ACLU of New Mexico's law clerk since September 2006. In Fall 2008, he will become the ACLU of New Mexico's second fulltime staff attorney. Egan earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Notre Dame and afterward put it to good use working as a bicycle courier in San Francisco. As a courier, he was a member of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and was active in unionizing other courier companies.  Prior to starting law school, Egan was the director of a small shelter for undocumented immigrants in El Paso, Texas.

Evan Farnsworth (Evie) was inspired by the suicide of her gay uncle to become engaged in LGBT issues in her Nashville, TN high school. She is a founding member of a student-led coalition to get the Metro Nashville School Board to expand the student non-discrimination policy to include sexual orientation and gender identity, expression, and appearance. Through a comprehensive public education campaign, the students have built up a coalition of  Nashville's most respected child welfare and youth groups dedicated to showing how anti-gay and anti-transgender bullying affects all students.  Farnsworth and the rest of the Support Student Safety coalition hope that their efforts will be a model for other students who want to make positive change within their school districts.  She is also active in her school's GSA, and helped to organize campus events like the Hume Fogg AIDS Walk, National Transgender Day of Remembrance, World AIDS Day and the National Day of Silence.

Peter Galison  is co-Director of the recent film Secrecy  and is also is Pellegrino University Professor of the History of Science and of Physics at Harvard University. In 1997, Galison was awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship; won a 1998 Pfizer Award (for Image and Logic ) as the best book that year in the History of Science; and in 1999 received the Max Planck and Humboldt Stiftung Prize. His books include How Experiments End (1987), Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps (2003), and most recently Objectivity (with L. Daston, 2007). He has worked extensively with de-classified material in his studies of physics in the Cold War. His film on the moral-political debates over the H-bomb, Ultimate Weapon: The H-bomb Dilemma has been shown frequently on the History Channel and is widely used in courses and seminars in the United States and abroad. Galison co-curated a major exhibition, "Iconoclash" at the German Media Museum (ZKM) in 2002. The show explored the battles between iconoclasm and iconophilia - the necessity and impossibility of images - in art, science, and religion.

Alex Gibney, award-winning filmmaker, took home the 2008 Oscar for Best Documentary for Taxi to the Dark Side, a gripping investigation into both the homicide of an innocent taxi driver at the Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, as well as the overall policies condoning indefinite detention, torture and abuse, and ultimately the abrogation of human rights and reckless abuse of power by the Bush Administration. The film asks and answers a key question: what happens when a few people expand the wartime powers of the executive office to undermine the very principles on which the United States was founded.

Gibney is well known for producing 2006 Oscar-nominated Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room , one of the top grossing documentaries of all time. His other films include: No End in Sight (Executive Producer); Mr. Untouchable (Producer), Who Killed the Electric Car (Consulting Producer); The Trials of Henry Kissinger (Writer/Producer); Herbie Hancock: Possibilities (Producer); Lightning in a Bottle (Producer); Wim Wenders` Soul of a Man (Producer) and Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues (Producer). Gibney is currently working on a number of new projects including, Casino Jack , a look at lobbyist Jack Abramoff and the selling of the American government.

He is a regular contributor to the Huffington Post, and has written for Newsweek, The LA Times, Newsday, New Republic , The Wilson Quarterly, LA Reader, Chicago Reader, and San Francisco Chronicle.

Peter Gilbert has had a distinguished career in producing, directing, and photographing documentaries, feature films, commercials, and music videos. He produced and directed, along with Steve James, the Full Frame Festival Inspiration Award-winning film At the Death House Door which premieres on IFC in May 2008. Also with James, Gilbert is one of the filmmakers behind Hoop Dreams (1994), which won every major documentary award and a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, serving as a producer and DP. He produced and directed With All Deliberate Speed (2004), which was nominated for a Prime Time Emmy for Distinguished Work in Non-Fiction Film. Gilbert executive produced the Sundance Festival Grand Jury and Audience award winning film, The Gods Grew Tired of Us (2005) and the award winning, Emmy nominated, Deadline (2004). Earlier work includes the Emmy Award-winning documentary Vietnam: Long Time Coming (1998) for which he won the DGA Award for Best Directing; Stevie (2003), as co-DP and co-producer; Married in America (2002), as DP; and Barbara Kopple's Academy Award-winning, American Dream (1991), as DP.

Peter Gilbert is a Board Member of Kartemquin Films in Chicago.

Jan Crawford Greenburg is an ABC News Legal Correspondent based in Washington , DC covering the Supreme Court and national legal issues. She provides legal analysis for all ABC News platforms.

Greenburg is the author of, Supreme Conflict: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Control of the United States Supreme Court (2007), a penetrating and unvarnished look at the making of the current United States Supreme Court and a news breaking account of the coordinated campaign to move the Court in a more conservative direction.

Prior to joining ABC, Ms. Greenburg was the national legal affairs reporter for the Chicago Tribune , the Supreme Court correspondent for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS, and a legal analyst for CBS' Evening News and Face the Nation . She covered the Supreme Court and national legal issues, including judicial appointments and confirmation battles.

Glenn Greenwald is a former constitutional and civil rights litigator in New York City, first at the Manhattan firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, and then at the litigation firm he founded, Greenwald, Christoph. Greenwald litigated numerous high-profile and significant constitutional cases in federal and state courts around the country, including multiple First Amendment challenges. He has a J.D. from New York University School of Law (1994) and a B.A. from George Washington University (1990).

Currently Greenwald is a Contributing Writer at Salon, where he writes the political and legal blog Unclaimed Territory .  Greenwald is the author of two New York Times Bestselling books:  How Would a Patriot Act? (2006), which critiqued the Bush administration's theories of executive power, and A Tragic Legacy , an examination of the history and impact of the Bush presidency.  His third book, Great American Hypocrites , was released by Random House/Crown in April, 2008.  His writings on surveillance issues and separation of powers have been cited by The New York Times, The Washington Post , U.S. Senators during floor debates, and official House reports on executive power abuses.

Christie Hefner has been the chairman and chief executive officer of Playboy Enterprises, Inc. since 1988, and oversees policy, management and strategy across the company. Widely acknowledged as having developed the strategies for reinventing Playboy Enterprises as a successful global multimedia and lifestyle company, Hefner has not only been a prominent and successful businesswoman, but a passionate advocate for a wide range of social causes.

Hefner has received numerous awards for her commitments to issues ranging from women's rights and diversity, to HIV/AIDS research, to human and civil rights. Among her many honors are: The Humanitarian Award from the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition; “Friend for Life” Award from the Howard Brown Medical Center; Corporate Leadership Award from the AIDS Pastoral Care Network; “Advocate of the Year” by the AIDS Legal Council; the National Cable & Telecommunications Association's Vanguard Award for Distinguished Leadership (2002); the University of Illinois at Chicago's Family Business Council's Leadership Award (2003). Hefner was named one of the 100 Most Powerful Women in the World by Forbes magazine in 2005, 2006 and 2007.

In 2000, Nadine Strossen, President of the ACLU, presented Hefner with the inaugural Champion of Freedom Award from the Anti-Defamation League for her commitment to diversity and inclusiveness.

Hefner established the Hugh M. Hefner First Amendment Awards in 1979 to honor individuals who have made significant contributions in the vital effort to protect and enhance First Amendment rights for Americans. Since the awards inception, over 125 individuals including high school students, lawyers, journalists and educators have been honored.

John Hiatt, critically-acclaimed musician, discovered his talent for music growing up in Indiana. He found inspiration in the groundbreaking songs of Bob Dylan, another figure with an encyclopedic knowledge of, and love for, vintage American music. When he arrived in Nashville as an 18-year-old, it was clear to anyone who listened closely that he not only had a lot to say, but was presenting it in a manner that brilliantly blended passion and sophistication. Such seminal releases as Bring The Family , Slow Turning, Stolen Moments and Walk On were the signal that he had become a distinctive and dynamic star. Hiatt's greatness couldn't be denied, and he subsequently made four more astonishing releases as the 21st century began.

Hiatt has played a variety of styles, including new wave, rock and roll and blues and country. His songs have been covered by a long list of musical luminaries including: Bob Dylan, Iggy Pop, Nick Lowe, the Neville Brothers, Emmylou Harris, Three Dog Night , Dr. Feelgood, Bonnie Raitt, Ronnie Milsap, Willie Nelson, B. B. King with Eric Clapton, Paula Abdul, and Mandy Moore.

Priscilla Huang is the National Asian Pacific American Women's Forum's (NAPAWF) Policy and Programs Director, where she oversees their reproductive justice, anti-trafficking and emerging immigrant rights programs. She was a Georgetown Women's Law and Public Policy fellow, and the recipient of Choice USA's 2007 “Courting Justice” Generation Award. She has worked on gender-based employment discrimination cases at Equal Rights Advocates, performed policy work at the National Abortion Federation, and worked as a child case manager at a transitional housing program for families with a history of homelessness and domestic violence.  Huang currently sits on the board of SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective, and Law Students for Reproductive Justice's Alumni Network Committee. She holds a law degree from American University, Washington College of Law, where she was a Public Interest/Public Service Scholar. She graduated with a B.A. in English and Philosophy from Boston College.

Arianna Huffington is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post, a nationally syndicated columnist, and author of 11 books, including most recently: Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe (And What You Need To Know To End The Madness) . She is also co-host of "Left, Right & Center," public radio's popular political roundtable program.

In May 2005, she launched The Huffington Post, a news and blog site that has quickly become one of the most widely-read, linked to, and frequently-cited media brands on the Internet. In 2006, she was named to the Time 100, Time Magazine's list of the world's 100 most influential people. Huffington has made guest appearances on numerous television shows, including Charlie Rose, Oprah, Nightline, Real Time with Bill Maher, Inside Politics, Larry King Live, Hardball, Good Morning America , the Today show , Countdown and The O'Reilly Factor.

She serves on several boards that promote community solutions to social problems, including A Place Called Home, which works with at-risk children in South Central Los Angeles. She also serves on the Board of Trustees for the Archer School for Girls.

Darryl Hunt is the President and Founder of the Darryl Hunt Project for Freedom and Justice. He is an award-winning speaker, mentor and community activist. After being wrongfully convicted twice of a rape and murder Hunt maintained his innocence. Eventually a DNA match confirmed that Willard E. Brown had actually committed those crimes and he was arrested and charged with the rape and murder on which Hunt was being held. As a result of his case, North Carolina has created an Innocence Inquiry Commission- the first of its kind in the country.

Hunt's story has been told in an HBO documentary film The Trials of Darryl Hunt, which premiered on HBO in April 2007. The film was a n official selection of the 2006 Sundance Film Festival, and received the Documentary Jury Prize and Audience Award at the Newport International Film Festival, among many other awards.

Hunt has been honored repeatedly for his work in the community, and has received: the Winston-Salem Chronicle- 2008 Man of the Year; the 2006 Henry Frye Trailblazer Award; the Winston-Salem Urban League/ Non-profit Agency of the year 2007; the North Carolina Academy of Trial Lawyers Crabtree Award-2006 and the National Black Theatre Festival Community Action Award-2007.

Darryl Hunt resides in Winston-Salem, North Carolina with his wife April and three children, and has made it his life's work to be a voice for the voiceless.

John Hutson is the Dean and President of the Franklin Pierce Law Center in Concord , New Hampshire .  He served as a judge advocate in the United States Navy from 1972-2000, and was the Judge Advocate General of the Navy from 1997-2000.

In 2004, Hutson and seven other retired officers wrote an open letter to President Bush expressing their concern over the number of allegations of abuse of prisoners in U.S. military custody. Later, Hutson testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in opposition to the appointment of Alberto Gonzales as attorney general of the United States , because of his alleged role in attempting to provide legal guidance to the U.S. military justifying abusive interrogation practices, including that the War on Terror "renders obsolete" and "renders quaint" aspects of the Geneva Conventions.

Hutson was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal, the Legion of Merit (with three gold stars), Meritorious Service Medal (with two gold stars), Navy Commendation Medal, and Navy Achievement Medal.

A.J. Jamal, one of comedy's hardest working comedians, has conquered television, film, concerts, colleges and comedy clubs with his captivating style. With credits that include a decade of television appearances, the comedian also served as host of his own show, the ACE Award nominated, Comic Justice on the Comedy Central Network. In fact, many remember Jamal from his early days, as part of the comedic core of In Living Color . He has worked in venues from Radio City Hall to Caesar's Palace, and performed in concert with a bevy of top recording artists, including Diana Ross, Aretha Franklin, Cher and Kenny Loggins. He's appeared on The Arsenio Hall Show , Comic Strip Live , A&E's An Evening at the Improv, and Def Comedy Jam . Jamal has also served as the host of Comedy in the Caribbean , for the Arts & Entertainment Network.

Dr. Marty Klein's fifth book is America's War On Sex: The Attack on Law, Lust, & Liberty . In her foreword, ACLU President Nadine Strossen calls it "an important book by my longtime colleague in the civil liberties movement, which galvanizes readers." The book documents how the Religious Right, the media, and government at all levels are using the issue of sexual regulation to undermine secular democracy and transform American governance.

As a policy analyst and expert in the sociology and psychology of adult entertainment, pornography, sexual behavior, and alternative sexualities, Marty has been a consultant or expert witness in several historic federal anti-censorship trials.

Marty has been a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist and Certified Sex Therapist for 27 years - 30,000 sessions helping women, men, and couples to explore their sexuality and feel sexually adequate and powerful.

Marty has trained almost 100,000 physicians, psychologists, and attorneys in human sexuality across the U.S. and in over a dozen countries. His talks are known to be consistently thought-provoking and entertaining, as is his blog, Sexual Intelligence ( www.MartyKlein.com ).

Bill Leonard recently retired after 34 years of Federal service. In his most recent position as the Director of the Information Security Oversight Office, he was responsible for policy oversight of the Executive branch-wide national security information classification system.  Before this appointment, Leonard served in the Department of Defense as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense (Security and Information Operations) during both the Clinton and Bush administrations. In 2002, the President conferred upon him the rank of Meritorious Executive. Leonard holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in History from St. John's University in New York City and a Master of Arts degree in International Relations from Boston University. He is currently the principal of his own consulting firm.

Toni Locy has worked for the nation's biggest and best news organizations, including the Washington Post, Boston Globe, USA Today and U.S. News & World Report, covering beats ranging from the U.S. Supreme Court and the Mafia to state and city government.

In March of 2008, a District Judge held Locy in contempt of court for not revealing the identities of people she talked to for a May 2003 story on the 2001 anthrax attacks and ordered her to pay the fine he had imposed -- as much as $45,000 -- out of her own pocket. A stay of the penalty pending an appeal was granted, but her case sparked a wave of support for a federal Shield Law that would protect journalists from being compelled to reveal confidential sources in most cases.

At USA Today, she covered the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack and its aftermath, including the Bush administration's policies regarding terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and elsewhere.

As a reporter at the Associated Press, Locy covered the U.S. Supreme Court and national legal issues. She left the AP in 2006 to attend the University of Pittsburgh's School of Law, where she was awarded a master's degree in the studies of constitutional and criminal law in May 2007.

Barry Lynn is executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a position he has held since October of 1992.  He is also a national board member of the ACLU. A member of the Washington , D.C. and Supreme Court bar, Lynn earned his law degree from Georgetown University Law Center in 1978. In addition, he is an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ who received his theology degree from Boston University School of Theology in 1973.

Lynn has appeared frequently on television and radio to discuss First Amendment issues, including appearances on: The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, The Today Show, Nightline, CNN's Crossfire, Good Morning America, The Daily Show, and Larry King Live. He also served for two years as regular co-host of "Pat Buchanan and Company" on the Mutual Broadcasting System, and as the Friday co-host of "Common Sense with Col. Oliver North" until North's recent retirement from radio.  Lynn now hosts his own daily syndicated show called "Cultureshocks". Lynn is the author of Piety and Politics: The Right-Wing Assault on Religious Freedom and co-author of The Right to Religious Liberty.

Rachel Maddow hosts "The Rachel Maddow Show" on Air America Radio (6-8PM Eastern in most markets). Maddow has been with Air America since its inception in Spring 2004. She's appeared on MSNBC, CNN, LOGO, and other TV outlets.

Maddow has a doctorate in Politics from Oxford and a background in progressive activism -- including a couple of very happy, hardscrabble years working with the ACLU National Prison Project to overturn the segregation of HIV-positive prisoners in Alabama and Mississippi. Maddow lives in Western Massachusetts and in New York City.

Richard Matasar has served as dean of New York Law School since 2000. A nationally recognized scholar in civil procedure and federal jurisdiction, Dean Matasar has published extensively in scholarly and academic venues. His teaching and scholarly areas include civil procedure, constitutional litigation, federal jurisdiction, trial advocacy, and professionalism.

Dean Matasar was the Levin Mabie & Levin Professor of Law at the University of Florida Fredric G. Levin College of Law, one of the ten largest law schools in the nation, and served as its ninth dean from 1996 to 1999. During his tenure, he created and implemented the school's first comprehensive strategic plan, which led to the development of several new research centers and an expanded international presence. The law school also successfully completed a fundraising campaign of more than $40 million and tripled its endowment.

Dean Matasar also was dean of the Chicago-Kent College of Law (1991-96). During his tenure, the school's endowment rose from $5 million to more than $17 million. He was responsible for enhancing the faculty and helping Chicago-Kent establish a reputation as the nation's leading institution in integrating technology into legal education.

David Nevin has defended criminal cases throughout the United States for almost 30 years. He has obtained acquittals in a number of high profile prosecutions which implicated issues of civil rights and government overreaching, including the 1993 Ruby Ridge case, and the 2004 terrorism prosecution of a Saudi Arabian graduate student, Sami Omar Al-Hussayen.

Nevin has been actively involved in the defense of capital cases since 1981, and has represented at least six death-sentenced defendants in various stages of post-conviction litigation. He has been qualified as an expert witness on the constitutional standards for lawyers in capital cases on five occasions in state and federal courts. He is a frequent lecturer and author on issues involving criminal law and civil rights.

Nevin received the Clarence Darrow Award from the ACLU of Idaho for his defense of Sami Al-Hussayen. He is the co-Director of the Legal Advisory Board of the Idaho Innocence Project; and a Fellow, and the current Idaho State Chair, of the American College of Trial Lawyers. He serves as an Adjunct Professor of Trial Practice at the University of Idaho College of Law, and has taught in the EPA's National Trial Advocacy Institute.

Nevin is a Top 75 Mountain States Superlawyer, was named one of the top 500 lawyers in the country by Lawdragon Magazine, is listed in Best Lawyers in America for criminal defense, and enjoys an AV rating from Martindale Hubbell.

Melissa Ngo is a Privacy and Information Policy Consultant and the publisher of PrivacyLives.com, "monitoring the pulse of privacy." She appears frequently in print and broadcast stories about privacy and civil liberty issues. Ngo has testified about privacy and civil liberties before legislators and government agencies, and she discusses such issues at academic, policy, and trade conferences. Prior to publishing PrivacyLives.com, Ngo was Senior Counsel and Director of the Identification and Surveillance Project at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a non-profit research education center in Washington , DC. At EPIC, she worked on a variety of civil liberty issues, such as anonymity, camera surveillance, identity theft and medical privacy.

Ngo recently co authored a white paper on national identification, REAL ID Implementation Review: Few Benefits, Staggering Costs (May 2008). She is the author of a chapter entitled You Are Being Watched But Not Protected: The Myth of Security Under Camera Surveillance in the book "Intersection: Sidewalks & Public Space" (ChainLinks 2008). She also is co editor of "Litigation Under the Federal Open Government Laws (FOIA) 2006" (EPIC 2006).

Ngo previously worked as a journalist ay USATODAY.com and The Washington Post.

Prof. Manfred Nowak is Professor of Constitutional Law and Human Rights at the University of Vienna and Director of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Human Rights. Since 1996, he has served as Judge at the Human Rights Chamber for Bosnia and Herzegovina, and, from 2000 to 2007, as Chairperson of the European Master Programme on Human Rights and Democratization (EMA) in Venice. From 1987 to 1989, he was Director of the Netherlands Institute of Human Rights (SIM) at the University of Utrecht , and from 2002 to 2003 Olof Palme Visiting Professor at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law (RWI) at the University of Lund.

Prof. Nowak was a member of the Austrian delegation to the UN Commission on Human Rights for many years, before he was appointed in 1993 as expert member of the UN Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances. During this term he also served as UN expert on missing persons in the former Yugoslavia, and in 2001 he was appointed UN expert on legal issues relating to the drafting of a binding instrument on enforced disappearances. In December 2004, he was appointed UN Special Rapporteur on Torture.

Prof. Nowak was appointed in 2000 chairperson of a Human Rights Commission at the Austrian Ministry of Interior with the task of monitoring the police. In 1994, he was awarded a UNESCO prize for the teaching of human rights and in 2007 the Bruno Kreisky prize for Human Rights. He has published more than 350 books and articles in the fields of human rights, public law and politics.

Ozomatli On the surface, nothing's changed. There's the same core line-up, the same oppositional politics, the same live shows that erupt into drum-line blessed community parties, and the same devotion to polyglot urban sound clashing. But here's what's new: after 12 years of collaborative song-writing, 12 years of constant touring everywhere from Denver to Tokyo to Sydney, 12 years of supporting anti-war mobilizations and global human rights movements, 12 years of pioneering Spanish-English mash-ups of hip hop, salsa, cumbia, dub, and Middle Eastern funk, and most importantly, 12 years of facing up to internal battles and personal struggles, they've emerged anew with their fourth full-length studio album, Don't Mess With The Dragon, the band's most cohesive, polished, and joyous record to date.

The band's dedication to addressing social justice issues-a hallmark of Ozomatli's work ever since the band formed in 1995 as part of a local labor protest-continues on Don't Mess With The Dragon. The blazing "Temperatura" was inspired by the May 2006 pro-immigration marches ("We wanted people to take it to the streets and turn up the heat," says Wil-Dog) and "Magnolia Soul" rebukes the Bush administration for their lack of Katrina relief.

Ozomatli will be performing at the ACLU Gala on Monday night.

Actor Kal Penn can currently be seen reprising the role of Kumar in the recently released Harold And Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay, sequel to 2004's cult classic Harold And Kumar Go To White Castle, as well as on the critically acclaimed television series, House.

Penn received rave reviews for his starring role in last year's highly anticipated film The Namesake, based on the novel by Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri and directed by Mira Nair. The film deals with issues of personal and national identity that many immigrants around the world face on a daily basis. Penn has appeared in other recent films including A Lot Like Love and Superman Returns. He had a recurring role on season 6 of 24 and recently guest starred on the hit series, Law & Order: SVU. Earlier credits include the Emmy Award winning HBO comedy Express: Aisle To Glory, Spin City, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, NYPD Blue, The Agency, and Angel.

Penn was born and raised in New Jersey where he graduated from the Freehold Regional High School District's Performing Arts High School. He received a bachelor's degree in Sociology with a Specialization in Theatre, Film and Television from the prestigious School of Theater, Film and Television at UCLA. Penn is currently an Adjunct Professor of Cinema, Sociology, and Asian American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He serves on the celebrity advisory board of the Red Cross, and is also currently pursuing a Graduate Certificate in International Security at Stanford University.

Reverend Carroll Pickett spent fifteen years as the "death house" chaplain at "The Walls," the Huntsville unit of the Texas prison system. In that capacity, he ministered to 95 men before they were put to death by lethal injection.

Rev. Pickett is the author of the acclaimed memoir, Within These Walls, an eloquent, unflinching look at his unique career and his intensely personal exposure to capital punishment. This first-hand experience gave him unique insight to write an impassioned statement on the realities of capital punishment in America. The book is a thought-provoking and compelling look inside the criminal mind, inside the execution chamber, and inside the heart of a remarkable man who shares his thoughts and observations not only about capital punishment, but about the dark world of prison society.

At the Death House Door, a new documentary from Steve James and Peter Gilbert is a personal and intimate look at the death penalty in the state of Texas through the eyes of Reverend Pickett. The film has had an award-winning run on the national film festival circuit and premieres on IFC on May 29th.

Rev. Pickett is today an outspoken anti-death penalty activist.  He is retired from the Department of Corrections but still preaches near Huntsville, Texas.

Greg Proops is perhaps best known for his appearances on the British and American versions of Whose Line Is It Anyway? , but his talents extend well beyond that popular show. Proops has sold out the Edinburgh Fringe Festival 28 years running; won The Weakest Link, Ben Stein's Money and Rock n' Roll Jeopardy ; and performs his stand up comedy all over the world, having performed live in Paris, Turkey, Milan, Aspen, Montreal, Scotland, Ireland, Norway, New Zealand and the United Arab Emirates . However, he can be found most frequently performing in his beloved hometown of San Francisco . Additionally, he contributed voices to a number of movies including: Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas and Star Wars, Episode I: The Phantom Menace . Some of his other television work includes appearances on: Last Comic Standing, Chelsea Lately, Ugly Betty, The Bigger Picture with Graham Norton on BBC, Mock the Week on BBC2, The Late, Late Show with Craig Ferguson, The Drew Carey Show, Just Shoot Me, The Jimmy Kimmel Show, ESPN Classic: All-Time Greatest World Series Teams.

 Proops cares like Bono and has performed and hosted at events for the ACLU including a rally to stop torture with Rep. Dennis Kucinich, Senator Patrick Leahy and Larry Cox, Director of Amnesty International USA.

Mark Rabil had been practicing law for four years when he was court-appointed to assist a senior partner in his law firm in representing Darryl Hunt, a 19-year-old black man charged with assaulting, raping, sodomizing and stabbing to death Deborah Sykes, a young, white, newspaper reporter. He would continue to represent Mr. Hunt for the next 20 years, through trials, hearings, investigations, appeals, and clemency and pardon proceedings. In the summer of 1993, post-conviction hearings regarding witness intimidation and discovery violations led to DNA tests proving that neither Hunt nor another suspect, Sammy Mitchell, was involved in the rape of Ms. Sykes.

Since 2003, Rabil has been an assistant capital defender in North Carolina and represents individuals who are charged with first-degree murder and face the death penalty. Rabil has served the Wake Forest University School of Law as a supervising attorney for the Clinical Program since 1983 and as an adjunct professor of trial advocacy since 2003. In 2004, the North Carolina Academy of Trial Lawyers awarded Rabil the Thurgood Marshall Award for his work representing Darryl Hunt.

The story of the case is told in Ricki Stern and Annie Sunberg's award-winning documentary, The Trials of Darryl Hunt .

James Risen is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. He joined The New York Times as a correspondent in the Washington bureau, covering national security and intelligence, in May 1998. Risen covered national security and intelligence from 1995 to 1998 for the Los Angeles Times ; he was chief economic correspondent in their Washington bureau from 1990 to 1995.

Risen is the author of the book State of War and is the coauthor of Wrath of Angels and The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the CIA's Final Showdown with the KGB.

Risen received a B.A. degree in history from Brown University in 1977 and an M.S. degree in journalism from Northwestern University in 1978.

George Soros is Chair of Soros Fund Management LLC. He was born in Budapest in 1930. He survived the Nazi occupation and fled communist Hungary in 1947 for England , where he graduated from the London School of Economics. He then settled in the United States, where he accumulated a large fortune through an international investment fund he founded and managed. Soros has been active as a philanthropist since 1979, when he began providing funds to help black students attend Cape Town University in apartheid South Africa. He has established a network of philanthropic organizations active in more than 50 countries around the world. These organizations are dedicated to promoting the values of democracy and an open society. The foundation network spends about $450 million annually. Soros is the author of ten books, including most recently The New Paradigm for Financial Markets. His articles and essays on politics, society, and economics regularly appear in major newspapers and magazines around the world.

Suzanne Spaulding is a Principal with Bingham Consulting Group and Of Counsel to Bingham McCutchen, in Washington, DC., where she works with clients on issues related to national security, homeland security, and international affairs. She spent 20 years handling national security issues for Congress and the Executive Branch, including serving as Assistant General Counsel at the CIA; Minority Staff Director for the U.S. House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence; General Counsel for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence; and as Legislative Director for U.S. Senator Arlen Specter. Spaulding also was the Executive Director of two congressionally mandated commissions, the National Commission on Terrorism, which was chaired by Amb. L. Paul Bremer III, and the Commission to Assess the Organization of the Federal Government to Combat the Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction, chaired by former CIA Director John Deutch, served as a consultant to the Advisory Panel to Assess Domestic Response Capabilities for Terrorism Involving Weapons of Mass Destruction (Glimore Commission) and the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction (Robb/Silberman Commission). In 2002, she was appointed by Virginia Governor Mark Warner to the Secure Virginia Panel, established after the attacks of September 11 to advise the Governor and the legislature regarding Commonwealth preparedness. She is also the Chair of the Advisory Committee of the American Bar Association's Standing Committee on Law and National Security.

Arlen Specter was elected to the United States Senate in 1980 and is currently serving his fifth term. In 2005, Senator Specter became Pennsylvania's longest serving U.S. Senator. He is Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and a senior member of the Appropriations and Veterans Affairs committees.

Senator Specter has been a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee since he came to the Senate. As such, he has played an instrumental role in many of the Senate's most important questions of constitutional law. Senator Specter has worked in a bipartisan fashion to advance legislation that protects the attorney client privilege. Most recently, Senator Specter, along with Senators Schumer and Lugar, sponsored legislation that would limit circumstances under which federal courts and other federal entities could compel a journalist to reveal confidential sources. The Supreme Court of the United States has held that the First Amendment does not require courts to recognize such a privilege, and federal courts are split on whether reporters have a common law privilege to withhold information. For this reason, Senator Specter has been working with his Senate colleagues to ensure passage of media shield legislation.

In May of 2008, Senator Specter and Senator Lieberman introduced legislation that would protect American journalists from libel suits brought in foreign courts that do not have the same protections for free speech that are found in the U.S. constitution.  The Free Speech Protection Act creates a federal cause of action and federal jurisdiction so that federal courts may determine whether there has been defamation under United States law when a U.S. journalist, speaker, or academic is sued in a foreign court for speech or publication in the United States. The bill authorizes a court to issue an order barring enforcement of a foreign judgment and to award damages.

Ricki Stern is a director, producer and writer. She is the co-director and a producer on The Devil Came on Horseback which premiered at Sundance in 2007 and has won several festival awards, including a Gotham Best Documentary nomination.

Stern also co-directed and co-produced the award-winning documentary The Trials of Darryl Hunt, about a man who spent 20 years in prison for a brutal rape/murder he did not commit. The film premiered at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival, and has won more than twenty festival awards to date. The film premiered on HBO followed by a theatrical and DVD release, October 2007 (THINKFilm).

Stern is the director and co-producer of the award winning In My Corner, a documentary film on the world of amateur boxing. She also directed and produced the Emmy nominated Neglect Not The Children , a documentary about a Harlem based youth program, hosted by Morgan Freeman (PBS).

Stern's producing credits include four films for HBO, Autopsy I, II, III and Murder 9 to 5. She founded Break Thru Films, Inc. in 1990.

Bryan Stevenson is the Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama and also a Professor of Law at the New York University School of Law. His representation of poor people and death row prisoners in the deep south has won him national recognition. He and his staff have been successful in overturning dozens of capital murder cases and death sentences where poor people have been unconstitutionally convicted or sentenced. Stevenson has been recognized as one of the top public interest lawyers in the country. His efforts to confront bias against the poor and people of color in the criminal justice system have earned him dozens of national awards including the National Public Interest Lawyer of the Year, the ABA Wisdom Award for Public Service, the ACLU National Medal of Liberty, the Reebok Human Rights Award, the Olaf Palme Prize for International Human Rights and the prestigious MacArthur Foundation Fellowship Award Prize. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School and the Harvard School of Government. Stevenson has published articles on race and poverty and the criminal justice system, and manuals on capital litigation and habeas corpus.

Kathleen M. Sullivan is the Stanley Morrison Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, where she is also the founding Director of the Stanford Constitutional Law Center. She was previously the Dean of Stanford Law School, and the first woman dean of any school at Stanford. One of the nation's leading constitutional scholars, Professor Sullivan edits the nation's leading casebook in constitutional law and has published a wide range of law review articles on civil rights and civil liberties, federalism, separation of powers, equal protection, and the Supreme Court. She has also commented frequently on legal issues in such forums as The New York Times , The Washington Post, The New York Review of Books , and the News Hour with Jim Lehrer.

Professor Sullivan is also an experienced appellate litigator, and chairs the appellate practice at the nation's largest firm devoted solely to business litigation, Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges. She has litigated numerous cases in federal and state courts and argued four cases before the United States Supreme Court. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and has repeatedly been named to the National Law Journal's list of the 100 Most Influential Lawyers in America. She is a longtime member of the ACLU National Advisory Board, and served as one of the ACLU of Massachusetts' outside counsel while she was at Harvard.

Helen Thomas, former White House Bureau Chief, is a trailblazer, breaking through barriers for women reporters while covering every President since John F. Kennedy. It's no wonder she is commonly referred to as "The First Lady of the Press." For 57 years, she also served as White House correspondent for United Press International, but recently left this post and joined Hearst Newspapers as a syndicated columnist.

In 1960, Thomas began covering then President elect John F. Kennedy, following him to the White House in January, 1961 as a member of the UPI team. It was during this first White House assignment that Thomas began closing presidential press conferences with "Thank you, Mr. President." Thomas was the only woman print journalist traveling with then President Nixon to China during his breakthrough trip in 1972. She has the distinction of having traveled around the world several times with Presidents Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton, during the course of which she covered every Economic Summit. The World Almanac has cited her as one of the 25 Most Influential Women in America .

Thomas has written four books, including Thanks for the Memories Mr. President: Wit and Wisdom from the Front Row at the White House, Front Row at the White House: My Life and Times , and her most recent, Watchdogs of Democracy (2006).

Adaora Udoji is co-host of The Takeaway with John Hockenberry, a new public radio program set to launch in the spring 2008. Previously, she was a host on Court TV, where she served as an anchor and trial correspondent. Udoji was a correspondent with ABC News and CNN, where she covered some of the most critical domestic and international stories of the past 15 years, including the last three presidential elections, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the O.J. Simpson criminal trial and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Udoji was part of the CNN team that earned a Peabody Award for its heralded coverage of Hurricane Katrina and was among those who contributed to the Tsunami Disaster coverage in South Asia that won the network a duPont-Columbia University Award. Additionally, the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences cited her for her coverage of the war in Afghanistan, and she is a Woodrow Wilson National Fellow.

At ABC, Udoji served as a foreign correspondent based in London, filing reports from Europe, the Persian Gulf, the Middle East and Central Asia. She also contributed to an ABC primetime documentary about death row in 1997, which was recognized with a Cine Eagle Award.