Noted legal scholar to discuss “James Madison’s Belated Appreciation of the First Amendment”

EUGENE, Ore. -- (Oct. 1, 2008) -- As most schoolchildren learn, James Madison was the principal author of the First Amendment of the Constitution. However, what most people don't know is that when he drafted the amendment he did not believe it was very important.

Legal scholar Vincent Blasi will discuss "James Madison's Belated Appreciation of the First Amendment" at 7 p.m., Tuesday, Oct. 14, at the Chiles Business Center, room 128, 925 E. 13th Ave. The event is free and open to the public.

As Blasi will elaborate during the lecture, Madison considered the separation of governmental powers to be the constitutional provision that would do the majority of the work to safeguard the basic rights of all citizens and the interests of political minorities. Declarations of rights, such as those in the First Amendment, he dismissed as ineffectual "parchment barriers" in the face of tyrannous majorities.

According to Blasi, Madison helped to pass the First Amendment and its accompanying amendments mainly to keep a promise to those who were reluctant to ratify the Constitution unless it was amended to include a Bill of Rights.

"As the nation's leading constitutional scholar in free speech jurisprudence, Vincent Blasi will offer the UO and its students an opportunity to 'imagine the past and remember the future' about the increasingly threatened freedom of expression as a fundamental tenet of our republican government," said Kyu Ho Youm, the UO School of Journalism and Communication's Jonathan Marshall First Amendment Chair, who coordinated the visit with faculty in the UO School of Law.

Blasi is the James Madison Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Virginia and the Corliss Lamont Professor of Civil Liberties at Columbia Law School. In addition, he has taught at the University of California Berkeley, the University of Michigan, Stanford, the University of Texas, and William and Mary. For the past 23 years, Professor Blasi has team-taught with Anthony Lewis, the former New York Times bureau chief and columnist, a course on freedom of the press in the Columbia Journalism School. In 1998 he was one of five law professors elected to be a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The lecture is co-sponsored by the UO School of Journalism and Communication and the School of Law.

About the University of Oregon
The University of Oregon is a world-class teaching and research institution and Oregon's flagship public university. The UO is a member of the Association of American Universities (AAU), an organization made up of 62 of the leading public and private research institutions in the United States and Canada. Membership in the AAU is by invitation only. The University of Oregon is one of only two AAU members in the Pacific Northwest.

Contact: Julie Brown, director of media relations, 541-346-3185, julbrown@uoregon.edu

Source: Zanne Miller, director of communication, 541-346-2519, zanne@uoregon.edu

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