You’re invited to join the Institute for Justice and the Texas Observer for a conversation about local retaliation.
In 1940, Robert Jackson—then the U.S. Attorney General and later one of the most revered Supreme Court Justices—cautioned prosecutors against using criminal laws to punish government critics. “With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes,” Jackson remarked, there is a “fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost everyone,” enabling law enforcement to “pick[] the man and then search[] the lawbooks.” Jackson urged “extreme care” to ensure that such laws are not used to trample over “our civil liberties.” Otherwise, little would be left to distinguish us from the 1940s police states in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.
Eighty years later, we seem to have forgotten that warning from a period of polarization resembling our own. Today, the stories of local retaliation—from a reporter in Laredo to a councilwoman in Castle Hills—abound, as the Texas Observer has reported.
Join us for a discussion of this reporting with the Texas Observer’s Gus Bova, who will moderate a conversation among several featured guests: Jason Buch, the reporter who broke those stories; Anya Bidwell, a civil rights attorney with the Institute for Justice who argued on behalf of the Castle Hills councilwoman in the United States Supreme Court this year; and David Gonzalez, a prominent Texas defense attorney who has served as a special prosecutor in cities and municipalities across the state.
Thank you for your interest in registering for IJ and Texas Observer in Conversation. Registration has now closed for this event. If you would like to join our waitlist please reach out to Elina Pavlukhina at [email protected] If you have any questions, or would like to be added to our waitlist, please email [email protected]
Event Speakers
