Cato News Notes

July/August 2017 • Policy Report

NEIL GORSUCH AND CATO
Justice Neil Gorsuch, recently confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court, was no stranger to Cato during his formative years. Just after graduating from Harvard Law, he and classmate Michael Guzman wrote a scholarly Policy Analysis for Cato titled “Will the Gentlemen Please Yield? — A Defense of the Constitutionality of State‐Imposed Term Limits.” And after he finished his clerkships on the Court, but before he headed off to Oxford to study natural law, he returned to Cato for a lengthy discussion of the subject with Cato’s vice president for legal affairs, Roger Pilon. Justice Gorsuch brings to the Court, Pilon said, a perspective on the Constitution and its underlying theory that for too long has been missing.

ROSE SMUGGLED ONTO CAMPUS
In July of last year, the University of Cape Town (UCT) decided to disinvite Cato senior fellow Flemming Rose from its campus, where he was set to deliver a lecture on — of all things — academic freedom. As the former editor of Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten, Rose famously commissioned cartoons of the prophet Mohammed that spurred international outrage and protests. Since then, Rose has been a tireless advocate of free speech throughout the world. In the UCT faculty’s letter announcing the decision, they admitted that they had come to the conclusion that academic freedom on their campus does indeed have “limitations.” Rose denounced their decision as “an intellectual disgrace.” But Rose is not easily daunted — he managed to sneak onto campus after all this May, where he delivered a well‐attended and peaceful lecture. His remarks at the nearby South African Institute of Race Relations, which invited him to speak after UCT disinvited him, received positive editorials in several South African newspapers.

FUTURE OF THE FREE SOCIETY
A Cato 40th Anniversary Online Forum
In honor of Cato’s 40th anniversary, the Institute has organized a special online forum on the future of the free society. Cato reached out to a diverse array of leading intellectuals and asked them to submit essays addressing the most pressing challenges to freedom in coming years, as well as reasons they have for optimism, important but underappreciated ideas pertinent to freedom, and the most important thing they have learned about free societies. The resulting collection includes essays from former Deputy Prime Minister of Poland Leszek Balcerowicz, George Mason’s Tyler Cowen, Deirdre McCloskey of the University of Illinois‐Chicago, Cato executive vice president David Boaz, and Conor Friedersdorf of the Atlantic. The forum is available at Cato.org/Cato40.