On February 23, depending on how you feel about a provision in the USA Patriot Act that bans even the most benign assistance to terrorist groups, Georgetown University Law Center Professor David Cole gave a rousing defense of First Amendment rights before the Supreme Court. Or, he is part of a dangerous effort to dismantle a statute in the law that U.S. government officials say has been instrumental to prosecuting terrorists in the years since the Patriot Act has been in effect.

In any event, Cole is the lead attorney for the defense in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, the first case heard by SCOTUS, writes the New York Times, to advocate for the preservation of free speech and association rights in the context of U.S. efforts to combat terrorism. Cole represents Ralph Fertig, a 79-year-old attorney who wants to provide legal assistance to two groups the State Department has designated as terrorist groups—a Tamil group and a Kurdish political party—in order to help them peacefully achieve some of their non-violent goals, such as protecting the rights of Kurdish workers.

The law prohibits providing training, personnel, service, and “expert advice or assistance,” in addition to more obvious forms of prohibited material assistance, like guns or money.

“The government cannot, consistent with the Constitution, make it a crime to engage in lawful discussion of peaceable activities,” Cole said in oral arguments, where he faced off with Solicitor General Elena Kagan, who argued that the law has been vital to trapping and prosecuting terrorists.

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Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service may be out one very valuable professor by the end of the school year. The U.S. has nominted Anthony Lake, the former national security adviser to Bill Clinton and Distinguished Professor in Practice of Diplomacy in the SFS, to be chief of UNICEF.

The news comes from the Associated Press, which obtained letters sent from U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice to other United Nations ambassadors touting Lake’s merits as a potential UNICEF chief. Rumors have been floating around about his potential nomination for a while, though. It is likely that he will ultimately be the candidate that U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon recommends to UNICEF’s board and who UNICEF approves, too—the chief of UNICEF has always been an American, largely because the U.S. is UNICEF’s greatest contributor.

Rice wrote that Lake would bring “extraordinary experience, strategic vision and energy to UNICEF’s essential work,” the AP reports.  She pointed out his nine years on the board of the U.S. Fund for UNICEF, where he served as chair from 2004-2007.

“As chairman, Tony oversaw a significant increase in private funding for the organization,” Rice said. “In addition to his ongoing involvement with the U.S. national committee, he has seen UNICEF in action in countries across Africa, in Haiti, and elsewhere.”

The term of current UNICEF chief Ann Veneman will expire on April 30, at which point Ban will recommend a new cheif to UNICEF’s board.

Lake was a foreign policy adviser to both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama during their presidential campaigns. He surprised some when he endorsed Obama over Hillary Clinton in 2008 and has served on the boards of several international aid programs. Lake had been rumored for several positions in the Obama government, but in March of 2009, Lake told the Voice he has been reluctant to reenter government, even while advising the Obama campaign.

“I told [the Obama campaign] I did not want anything and then I reaffirmed that during the course of the campaign,” Lake said. “At a certain age you decide the torch should be passed, and a lot of very competent people could do what I would have been doing.”

Lake declined to comment on the nomination through his assistant, Jeff Mettille.

T. Alexander Aleinikoff

Dean of the Georgetown University Law Center T. Alexander Aleinikoff has been appointed to serve as the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights starting on February 1, according to a University broadcast e-mail. According to the UN, the office of the Comissioner for Human Rights “leads global human rights efforts [and] speaks out objectively in the face of human rights violations worldwide.”

Aleinikoff will remain as Dean of the Law Center until late January when he will move to Geneva, Switzerland where the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights is located.

Aleinikoff first joined the Georgetown Law faculty in 1997. According to his faculty page, he has published in the areas of “immigration refugee and citizenship law and policy, constitutional law, statutory interpretation and race discrimination.”

Later, he served as associate dean for research from 2003 to 2004 until becoming dean of the Law Center and executive vice president of Georgetown University in 2004.  He is also one of the highest paid staff members at Georgetown, with an annual salary of $390,130, according to the 990 report from the 2007-2008 school year.

The full email sent to the campus community by President DeGioia after the jump.

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Master of Science in Foreign Service Professor Joseph Cirincione went on the Colbert Report this past Monday to discuss the Ploughshares Fund, a group which advocates against nuclear proliferation.

Cirincione, who is president of the Fund, was probably prepared for Colbert-level provocation, but not for anything on the order of Colbert’s epic, 51-second impression of total nuclear annihilation. (It begins at the 3:30 mark).

On the program, Cirincione seemed less than amused. He came around the next day on Twitter: “Stephen Colbert does the best imitation of a nuclear explosion I have ever seen.”

Next, he and Colbert played “sanction, bomb, or marry.” And the real fun began.

Via Anthony Clark Arend’s blog.

The Catholic Archdiocese of Washington provoked quite a stir this week when it announced that it would abandon its contracts with the city unless the D.C. Council changed its proposed same-sex marriage bill.  The church says that the bill could force it to extend employee benefits to same-sex married couples, so they would no longer be able to provide the charitable services they currently offer.

Patrick Deneen (left), an associate professor of Government at Georgetown and director of the Tocqueville Forum, hosted a chat on the Washington Post’s website yesterday to explain and defend the Archdiocese’s decision.

Deneen spent a large part of the chat trying to re-frame the issue as the church being forced into giving up business relations with the city:

I think the basic premise of the Post’s story requires clarification. The premise of today’s story was that the Catholic Church was threatening to cease to provide charitable services if the law legalizing gay marriage is passed. In point of fact, it is the DC government that would cease to license or contract with the Church unless the Church conformed to a definition of marriage that violates its faith tradition.

Without a set of broader legal exemptions allowing for the Church to remain faithful to its definition of marriage, it will cease to be permitted by the City to provide the contracted and licensed services that it has for well over a century. The Church’s fundamental desire in this controversy is to continue its desire and freedom to serve.

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Earlier this week, President Barack Obama announced that he was nominating Chai Feldblum, an openly lesbian Georgetown Law professor, to serve on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

The EEOC is a federal agency whose purpose is to end workplace discrimination based on race, color, national origin, religion, sex, age, disability or whistle-blowing.

Feldblum has been at the Law Center since 1991, and founded and directed the Georgetown Law Federal Legislation and Administrative Clinic, a program for students interested in legislative law.  She is an expert on and advocate of disability and gay rights, and was involved in drafting the Americans with Disabilities Act.

From ruling the ICC to ruling half the globe…

Arturo Valenzuela, a professor of Government and the Director of the Center for Latin American Studies in the SFS, was just named as President Obama’s nominee for Assistant Secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs.

Born in Chile, Valenzuela specializes on Latin American politics and U.S.-Latin American relations. During the Clinton administration, he served as Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs and Senior Director for Inter-American Affairs at the National Security Council.

Photo from the SFS website. Thanks to former Voice EIC Tim Fernholz for the tip!

Movin’ on up

Last week, we speculated on the possibility of Georgetown professor Michael Oren being appointed Israel’s Ambassador to the U.S. Turns out he got the gig, according to Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman have chosen Michael Oren as Israel’s next ambassador to Washington. The cabinet is expected to approve the appointment before Netanyahu’s visit to Washington on May 17.

The benefit of the Voice bump? Probably…

Photo from pbs.org.

Au revoir, Madame?

Could Georgetown professor Madeline Albright be in line for a promotion? That’s what NY Foreign Policy Examiner heard from French Nouvel Observateur:

“An article in today’s French Nouvel Observateur hinted at the possibility of Barack Obama appointing Madeleine Albright as special ambassador to France.

From the French point of view, they are just tickled pink. Mrs. Albright is a francophile, knows France quite well …. She has also been an advisor to President Obama on foreign affairs.”

University Spokesperson Julie Green Bataille hasn’t responded yet to questions of what an ambassadorship would mean for Albright’s availability to continue teaching at Georgetown is she made our list, but we’ll keep you posted.

Scoop via the amazing Hunter Kaplan.

Photo from Flickr user Ross Mayfield used under a Creative Commons license.

Now where did I put that dissident…?

Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi appeared today before a Georgetown audience in the ICC Auditorium via satellite uplink, and though his video presence failed to inspire more student ire than JuicyCampus’ Matt Ivester, that’s not to say the event was without highlights, including Qaddafi’s characterization of Osama bin Laden as “reasonable.”

As is typical of guest speaker events, the most interesting part of the conference was the Q and A session. An anonymous student put Qaddafi in the hot seat for a moment when he asked whether Qaddafi would ever apologize for the Libyan terrorist bombing of a flight over Scotland, to which he replied:

“My son, my son, this file has been closed. It is not in the interest of anyone that we start in what we call grave digging. If you want to go to arbitration, Libya will turn out to be innocent of anything .. And if we start digging the graves, we go back to Philadelphia, we go to the massacre in Iraq, we go back to the revolutionary war and the constitution. It is not in the interest of anyone to reopen this discussion.”

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