For Immediate Release
June 26, 2008

Media Contact:

Kara Tershel, (202) 662-9500

Professor David Cole

WASHINGTON, D.C. - In recognition of his continued commitment to the pursuit of civil rights and civil liberties, Georgetown University Law Center Professor David Cole was presented the Lifetime Commitment to Justice Award by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. He accepted the award in Washington, D.C., on June 15.

Cole, and his co-counsel, Marc Van Der Hout, were honored for their work defending a group of immigrants known as the LA 8. Members of the group, comprised of seven Palestinian men and a Kenyan woman, were arrested in 1987 for associating with and distributing the magazines of a Palestine Liberation Organization faction. The U.S. government claimed that the faction was advocating "world communism," making affiliation with it a deportable offense under the McCarthy-era McCarran-Walter Act.

In a 1989 case that Cole litigated with the Center for Constitutional Rights, the National Lawyers Guild and the ACLU, a federal judge declared the charges against the LA 8 to be unconstitutional, and Congress later repealed the McCarran-Walter Act. However, the U.S. government continued to seek deportation, under charges that the group provided material support to a terrorist organization, including by distributing its magazines. When the Patriot Act passed after 9/11, they were charged with violating it, based on their conduct nearly two decades earlier.

Cole and Van Der Hout spent 21 years defending the LA 8 on a pro bono basis. His efforts included several appeals to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. In October 2007, after an immigration judge dismissed the deportation case for prosecutorial misconduct, the government agreed to drop all charges and to stop seeking deportation.

Cole, whom New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis has called "one of the country's great legal voices for civil liberties today," has received numerous honors for his civil rights and civil liberties work, including awards from the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, Society of American Law Teachers, Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of the Freedom of Expression, the American Bar Association’s Individual Rights and Responsibilities Section, the National Lawyers Guild, the Political Asylum and Immigrants’ Rights Project, the American Muslim Council and Trial Lawyers for Public Justice.

Cole is the co-author of "Less Safe, Less Free, Why America Is Losing the War on Terror," which captured the first Roy C. Palmer Civil Liberties Prize at Chicago-Kent College of Law in 2007, and "Terrorism and the Constitution: Sacrificing Civil Liberties in the Name of National Security." He is the author of "Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism," winner of the American Book Award in 2003, and "No Equal Justice: Race and Class in the American Criminal Justice System," named best nonfiction book of 1999 by the Boston Book Review and best book on a subject of national policy by the American Political Science Association.

In addition to teaching at Georgetown Law, Cole is a volunteer attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights. He is also the legal affairs correspondent for The Nation, a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and a commentator on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered.

 

About Georgetown University Law Center 

Georgetown University Law Center is one of the world's premier law schools. It has the largest full-time faculty in the nation and is pre-eminent in several areas, including constitutional, international, tax and clinical law. Drawing on its Jesuit heritage, it has a strong tradition of public service and is dedicated to the principle that law is but a means, justice is the end. With this principle in mind, Georgetown Law has built an environment that cultivates an exchange of ideas and the pursuit of academic excellence. It brings together an extraordinarily varied group of teachers, scholars and practitioners, as well as an outstanding student body representing more than 60 countries.

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