Nies Lecture in Intellectual Property: The First Amendment Without Strict Scrutiny?, April 3

Join Marquette University Law School for the 2025 Nies Lecture in Intellectual Property, "The First Amendment Without Strict Scrutiny?," on Thursday, April 3, from 5 p.m. to 6 p.m. in Eckstein Hall, followed by a reception in the Lubar Center.

The lecture will be given by Rebecca Tushnet, Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at Harvard Law School and director of the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University. The event is complimentary, but registration is required. Register online.

A decade ago, in Reed v. Town of Gilbert (2015), the Supreme Court announced that strict scrutiny applied to all content-based regulations challenged under the First Amendment. While the decision was controversial at the time, it was hard to predict that, by 2025, the very relevance of the longstanding "tiers of scrutiny" framework would be hotly contested by scholars and justices alike. Regardless of whether the tiers themselves survive, the questions of free speech values and judicial competence that motivated the development of that framework will remain. And the history of (mostly failed) First Amendment challenges to intellectual property rules offers some lessons for what may be ahead.

After graduating from Harvard College and Yale Law, Tushnet served as a law clerk to Judge Edward R. Becker of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and to Justice David H. Souter of the U.S. Supreme Court and practiced at Debevoise & Plimpton. Tushnet engages widely with the academic legal community and the practicing bar.

This annual lecture remembers the Hon. Helen Wilson Nies, who served as a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit from 1982 until 1996 (and as chief judge from 1990 to 1994).

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