Listen to the lecture by clicking on the links below.
Introductory Remarks, Al Tims (2:43) -- Introductory Remarks, Prof. Jane Kirtley (3:52)
Main Lecture, Robert Corn-Revere (55:33) -- Question & Answer Session (13:27)

Rick Distaso has been a Judge of the Stanislaus County Superior Court since July 2005. Prior to being appointed to the Superior Court, he was a Senior Deputy District Attorney with the Stanislaus County District Attorney’s Office. His assignments within the District Attorney’s Office included the Homicide Prosecution Team, Crimes Against Children/Sexual Assault Unit, Felony Trial Team and Juvenile Unit. From 2003-2005 he successfully prosecuted the case of The People v. Scott Peterson. This case received worldwide publicity and was covered by every major news medium. In 2000 he received an Award of Excellence from the Stanislaus County Sheriff’s Office for his role in prosecuting the first internet attempted child molestation case in Stanislaus County. In 2005, he received the National District Attorney’s Association “Home Run Hitter’s Award,” and was named one of the California District Attorney’s Association’s Outstanding Prosecutors of the Year. In 2006, he was named one of California Lawyer Magazine’s Attorney’s of the Year in criminal law.

The Judges in J-Schools pilot program is being launched in only three Journalism Schools in the United States with the goal of developing and presenting educational programs for legal affairs journalists covering the courts. This event is being co-sponsored by the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for the Courts and Media, National Judicial College. The concept for the National Center for the Courts and Media was created when journalist Rollan Melton served as trustee and secretary of the National Judicial College Board of Trustees. Rollan Melton devoted his adult working life to the field of journalism, working as a reporter, editor, public relations manager, Editor in Chief and publisher of the Reno Evening Gazette, and Vice President and President of the Speidel Newspaper Group. As president, Melton negotiated the 1977 merger of Speidel into Ganett and went on to serve on the Ganett Newspapers Board of Directors. Rollan Melton went on to author several books and, on November 30, 2001, was inducted into the Nevada Writers’ Hall of Fame.

The Center brings together the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada and The National Judicial College, and aims to unite the independent judiciary and the free press.

During his visit to the University of Minnesota Judge Distaso will be visiting four SJMC classes. The schedule is listed below:

• Electronic Newscast Producing with Prof. Ken Stone, from 9:05 am – 11:00 am
• Magazine Writing, with Prof. Leyla Kokmen, 11:15 am – 12:30 pm
• Intermediate News Reporting with Prof. Gayle Golden, from 2:30 pm – 3:45 pm
• Mass Media Ethics: Moral Reasoning and Case Studies, with Prof. Gary Schwitzer, from 4:40 pm – 5:55 pm

This event is being co-sponsored by:

the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for
the Courts and Media
National Judicial College

For more information, contact the Silha Center
www.silha.umn.edu - 612-625-3421

Click here to listen to streaming audio of this event.
Click here to view photos of this event.

Geoffrey Stone has been a member of the University of Chicago law faculty since 1973. From 1987 to 1993, Mr. Stone served as dean of the University of Chicago Law School, and from 1993 to 2002 he served as Provost of the University of Chicago. Mr. Stone received his undergraduate degree in 1968 from the University of Pennsylvania and his law degree in 1971 from the University of Chicago Law School, where he served as editor-in-chief of the Law Review. Mr. Stone served as a law clerk to Judge J. Skelly Wright of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and to Justice William J. Brennan Jr. of the Supreme Court of the United States. Mr. Stone was admitted to the New York Bar in 1972 .

Mr. Stone teaches primarily in the areas of constitutional law and evidence, and writes principally in the field of constitutional law. His most recent book, Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism (2004) received the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award for 2005, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for 2004 as the Best Book in History, and was a Finalist for the American Bar Association's 2005 Silver Gavel Award. It was also hailed as among the most notable books of 2004 by the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Christian Science Monitor.

Mr. Stone is currently chief editor of a fifteen-volume series, Inalienable Rights, which will be published by the Oxford University Press between 2006 and 2010. He is working on a new book, Sexing the Constitution. His past works include Eternally Vigilant: Free Speech in the Modern Era (2001), The Bill of Rights in the Modern State (1992) (with Mr. Epstein and Mr. Sunstein), Constitutional Law (5th ed. 2005) (with Mr. Sunstein), and The First Amendment (2d ed. 2003) (with Mr. Sunstein). Mr. Stone also serves as an editor of the Supreme Court Review (with Mr. Hutchinson and Mr. Strauss).

Among his many public activities, Mr. Stone is a member of the national Board of Directors of the American Constitution Society, a member of the National Advisory Council of the American Civil Liberties Union, Vice-President of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the American Law Institute, a member of the Board of the Renaissance Society, and Chair of the Board of the Chicago Children's Choir. In the past, he has served as a member of the Executive Committee of the Association of American Law Schools, a member of the Board of Advisers of the National Association of Public Interest Law, a member of the Advisory Board of the Legal Aid Society, a member of the Board of Directors of the University of Chicago Hospitals, a member of the Board of Governors of Argonne National Laboratory, and a member of the Advisory Board of the Chicago Volunteer Legal Services Foundation.

This year's lecture will be followed by reception and book signing.
Copies of "Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism" will be available for purchase.

Silha Center activities are made possible by a generous endowment from the late Otto Silha and his wife, Helen.

Seth Mnookin delivered the keynote address at the 2006 Silha Center Spring Ethics Forum to mark the Society of Professional Journalists Fourth Annual Ethics in Journalism Week. The theme for this year’s national Ethics Week is taken from the SPJ Code of Ethics: Seek Truth and Report It. SPJ chapters around the United States will host events observing Ethics Week April 24-29, 2006.

Mnookin’s speech was followed by commentary by Kate Parry, Reader’s Representative at the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Jane Kirtley, Silha Professor of Media Ethics and Law, Director of the Silha Center at the University of Minnesota’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication, and a member of the SPJ Minnesota Pro Chapter board, moderated. The presentation included audience Q&A, and was followed by a book-signing and reception.

Mnookin is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and a former senior writer for Newsweek, where he covered media, politics and popular culture. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, New York magazine, The New York Times Book Review, Spin, Slate, Salon, The New York Observer, and other publications. He began his journalism career as a rock critic for the now-defunct webzine Addicted to Noise, and has also worked as a crime reporter (at The Palm Beach Post), a city hall reporter (at the Forward), and as a political reporter (at Brill’s Content). He graduated from Harvard College in 1994 with a degree in the History of Science, and was a 2004 Joan Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

The Silha Spring Ethics Forum is co-sponsored by the Society of Professional Journalists , and the Minnesota Pro Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. Silha Center activities are made possible by a generous endowment from the late Otto Silha and his wife, Helen.

Click here to view photos of this event.

With Special Presenters:

Mary Horvath
Program Manager; Senior Computer Forensic Examiner, Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Dick Reeve
General Counsel/Deputy District Attorney for Computer Crimes, Denver District Attorney's Office; Adjunct Professor, University of Denver College of Law and University College Graduate Program in Computer Information Systems.

Stephen Cribari
University of Minnesota Law School;
Former Federal Public Defender, Eastern District of Washington, and Deputy Defender, District of Maryland.

Featured Speaker: Kathleen Hall Jamieson
Director of the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy
Center, author, and CBS commentator

Panelists:
Pat Kessler, Journalist, WCCO Television and KTLK Radio
Tom Horner, Himle Horner Public Relations
Moderator:
Lawrence Jacobs, Director, Center for the Study of Politics and
Governance

Opening remarks were delivered by The Honorable Paul Anderson,
Minnesota Supreme Court Justice and former Chair of the Minnesota News Council

The panel was moderated by Jane Kirtley,
Silha Professor and Director of the Silha Center for the Study of Media Ethics and Law

Panelists included:
Bill Kovach, Chair of the Committee of Concerned Journalists
Ted Canova, former News Director for Fox-9/UPN 29 (Twin Cities)
Dave Kansas, Editor, Money Section of the Wall Street Journal
Nora Paul, Director of the Institute for New Media Studies, University of Minnesota

Geneva Overholser holds the Curtis B. Hurley Chair in Public Affairs Reporting, for the Missouri School of Journalism, in its Washington bureau. She is a frequent print and broadcast media critic.

Ms. Overholser was editor of the Des Moines Register from 1988 to 1995. She has also been a syndicated columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group, ombudsman of the Washington Post and columnist for the Columbia Journalism Review. She has been a member of the editorial board of the New York Times, deputy editorial page editor and editorial writer for the Des Moines Register and reporter for the Colorado Springs Sun. She spent five years overseas, working and writing in Kinshasa and Paris.

She holds a bachelors in history from Wellesley College , a masters in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and a French language certificate from the Sorbonne. She has honorary doctorates from Grinnell College and St. Andrews Presbyterian College, and alumnae achievement awards from Wellesley, Northwestern and Medill.

Ms. Overholser was a Nieman fellow at Harvard and a Congressional fellow with the American Political Science Association. She was named "Best in the Business" in the American Journalism Review, and "Editor of the Year" by the National Press Foundation. Under her leadership, the Register won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for Public Service for a series on the rape of an Iowa woman. She was elected a fellow of the Society of Professional Journalists and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and received the 2002 Anvil of Freedom Award.

Ms. Overholser is a member of the board of the Knight Fellowships at Stanford and a trustee of the Stanley Foundation. She serves on the steering committee of the Committee of Concerned Journalists, the Journalism Advisory Committee of the Knight Foundation and the advisory boards of the Aspen Institute Global Interdependence Initiative and the Fund for Independence in Journalism. She was for nine years a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board, the final year as chair, and is a former board member and officer of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. She is a former trustee of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and former member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She is a frequent lecturer on journalism issues, across the United States and abroad.

The annual Silha Lecture is supported by a generous endowment provided by the late Otto Silha and his wife, Helen.

Starr speaks on Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act

The 18th Annual Silha Lecture featured Kenneth Starr, whose presentation, “Political Liberty: Campaign Finance and the Freedoms of Speech and Association” provided a unique perspective on the controversial Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, also known as McCain-Feingold.

McCain-Feingold, which President Bush signed into law on March 27, 2002 , amends the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971. Starr is a member of the legal team representing Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) in his constitutional challenge to the Act.

In May 2003, a three-judge federal court panel in Washington , D.C. , issued a 1,638-page opinion striking down parts of the statute, including the ban on national party committees raising “soft-money” from corporations, unions and others. Other sections of the law were upheld, including a ban on soft money solicitation by federal officeholders. The panel later stayed the ruling, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to lift that stay pending its own review of the case. The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Sept. 8, 2003 . Starr said he expects a decision by the end of the calendar year.

The legal team argued that McCain-Feingold violates the First Amendment rights to free speech and association by restricting political spending by individuals and groups. “It has taken our nation into territory previously viewed as off limits to governmental regulation,” Starr said.

Starr discussed Buckley v. Valeo , the first campaign finance case brought to the Supreme Court in 1976. The Court's decision effectively overruled two parts of the 1974 Federal Election Campaign Act, which imposed mandatory spending limits on all federal races and limited independent spending on behalf of federal candidates.

The Court ruled that such restrictions violated the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of expression, finding that spending limits on political campaigns reduce the quantity of expression by restricting the number of issues discussed, the depth of their exploration, and the size of the audience reached.

Starr said that the Supreme Court treats matters of political campaign financing carefully. “This is political regulation of activity that goes to the heart of representative government,” he said.

Starr contrasted McCain-Feingold with the Supreme Court's 1964 ruling in New York Times v. Sullivan . In Sullivan , Starr said, ordinary citizens pooled their resources to buy an ad in The New York Times in order to increase national exposure to the struggle for civil rights in the South. This, Starr said, was a perfect example of political speech and free association as guaranteed by the First Amendment. Under McCain-Feingold, a similar ad could, under some circumstances, constitute a crime, he suggested.

Starr used the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) as an example of the broad spectrum of groups whose speech would be affected under McCain-Feingold. Under the statute, it would be a crime for the ACLU to broadcast an ad on radio or television advocating a particular civil liberties issue if the ad mentioned a candidate for public office by name and were broadcast close to the election.

Starr also pointed out that the new Act only covers television and cable. The law exempts print media and the Internet. “McCain Feingold has abruptly reversed the trend of deregulation of the media itself and more precisely citizens' use of the media to convey citizens' messages and to express their views and concerns,” Starr said.

The University of Minnesota bookstore sponsored a book signing for Starr's new book First Among Equals: The Supreme Court in American Life . The book examines the influence of the Supreme Court on American culture.

Starr has been a partner at the Washington , D.C. office of Kirkland & Ellis since 1993. From 1989-1993, he served as the Solicitor General of the United States and was a U.S. Circuit Judge, D.C. Circuit from 1983-1989.

Starr spoke to a crowd of approximately 470 at the Ted Mann Concert Hall on the West Bank of the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus on Nov. 6, 2003 . University faculty, staff and students, as well as media and legal professionals and members of the general public, attended the lecture.

The Silha Lecture Series is supported by a generous endowment provided by the late Otto Silha and his wife, Helen.

2005 Spring Forum on the Constitution, Privacy and Digital Media

2004 Fall Forum with Barry Allen

2003 Fall Forum with Ethics Panel

2002 Silha Fall Forum with Steve Cribari

2002 Silha Center Lecture with Anthony Lewis

2002 Spring Silha Forum with Dan Fisher

2000 Silha Center Lecture with Chip Bok

2001 Silha Center Spring Forum
with Barry Allen

2001 Silha Center Lecture with Lee Levine

2001 Silha Center Fall Forum

Ethics Panelists Discuss Why Journalists Cheat at the Fall 2004 Forum

First Amendment scholar and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Anthony Lewis delivers the 17th Annual Silha Lecture

First Amendment Attorney Lee Levine delivers 16th Annual Silha Lecture

Listen to the audio from the "Terror! Media Coverage of Sept. 11 and the Aftermath" event

Silha Forum Focuses on Film Restoration

Award Winning Cartoonist Delivers 15th Annual Silha Lecture