The Brennan Center held the first ever national conference on automatic voter registration. Part 2 includes the keynote speech delivered by former Attorney General Eric Holder. 

The Brennan Center held the first ever national conference on automatic voter registration. Part one includes a keynote speech from California Secretary of State Alex Padilla. 

Despite the success of last year’s surveillance reform legislation (the “USA FREEDOM Act”), the U.S. retains the ability to collect millions of Americans’ phone calls and e-mails without a warrant—and without any oversight by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court—under Executive Order 12333 (EO 12333). The order underlies the intelligence community’s most expansive surveillance authorities. It generally governs the interception of electronic communications overseas, but as a Brennan Center report shows, its broad scope has significant implications for Americans.

Just Security, the Brennan Center for Justice, and a panel of leading experts discussed a range of issues about the questions surrounding EO 12333 surveillance. 

Panelists included Neema Singh Guliani Legislative Counsel, American Civil Liberties Union; Deborah Pearlman, Associate Professor, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law; Rebecca Richards, Director, Office of Civil Liberties and Privacy, National Security Agency; Ames Toh, Legal Advisor to the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression; former Counsel, Brennan Center for Justice; and Harlan Yu, Principal, Upturn.

Listen to an engaging discussion with Samuel Issacharoff, one of the pioneers in the law of the political process and the author of Fragile Democracies: Contested Power in the Era of Constitutional Courts. 

In Fragile Democracies: Contested Power in the Era of Constitutional Courts, renowned professor and scholar Samuel Issacharoff examines the often-overlooked role of constitutional courts in transitional democracies around the world in the past 25 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Listen to an engaging discussion with Adam Cohen, author of Imbeciles, an exciting exposé of the American legal system. 

Imbeciles has been coined a "superb history of eugenics in America" by the New York Times,and the book's relevance to our current political state is highlighted in the New Yorker, stating "it's impossible ... to read 'Imbeciles' without thinking of the current election cycle." 

Listen to a riveting discussion by author Stephen Dycus about his new book, "Soldiers on the Home Front: The Domestic Role of the American Military." Called a “required reading for serious students of national security and responsible citizens alike” by former NSA and CIA General Counsel Elizabeth Rindskopf Parker, Soldiers on the Home Front: The Domestic Role of the American Military, coauthored by Stephen Dycus and William C. Banks, critically assesses the domestic role of the military as it is shaped by law and asks what practices must be established for the crises to come.

In his new book The Parties Versus the People: How to Turn Republicans and Democrats into Americans, Mickey Edwards exposes the detrimental effects of partisanship on democracy in the United States. Reaching back to his own experience as an eight-term member of the United States House of Representatives, Edwards shows how the existing political system allows parties to control the ballot, resulting in an increasingly unrepresentative democracy.

In the midst of the 2016 election, Mickey Edwards discussed solutions to fix this broken system that our Founders warned us against, and allow the people to reclaim political power.

The Brennan Center hosted an engaging discussion with Richard L. Revesz and Jack Lienke, authors of Struggling for Air: Power Plants and the "War on Coal." Their new book chronicles the Environmental Protection Agency's five-decade struggle to clean up the nation's dirtiest coal-fired power plants.

In response to the growing influence of money in politics in recent elections, the Brennan Center hosted a workshop to discuss Professor Rick Hasen’s most recent contribution to the debate – his new book Plutocrats United: Campaign Money, the Supreme Court, and the Distortion of American Elections. He was joined by several other leading academics in the field.