TODAY - St. Bellarmine Pre-Law Society Presents "Misinformation, Demagogues, and the First Amendment”

Please join the St. Robert Bellarmine Pre-Law Society in the Bellarmine Hall Diffley Board Room on Friday, September 20th at 4:30pm for a lecture by Dr. Charles U. Zug, Kinder Assistant Professor of Constitutional Democracy at the University of Missouri.

In this lecture, Dr. Zug will discuss the rise of misinformation—deceptive speech with mass appeal—and demagoguery, which has provoked a renewed interest in the purposes of the Constitution's First Amendment. Traditionally defined as destabilizing speech used to obtain influence and power, demagoguery was a central preoccupation of the founders of the US Constitution, who worried that free speech would degenerate into misinformation that would, in turn, empower authoritarian leaders. Dr. Zug will argue that the concept of demagoguery lost intelligibility as a consequence of the American state's approach to speech where government policy has tended to oscillate between the legal extremes of free speech absolutism and criminalization and suggest that because demagoguery is fundamentally a political concept, the legalization of speech issues in America has, generally, eroded our capacity to reason about speech as a political phenomenon.

This event is sponsored by the St. Robert Bellarmine Pre-Law Society.  It is co-sponsored by the Humanities Institute and the Politics, Communications, and History Departments.

Light refreshments will be served.