September 17, 2002

As part of a national lecture series called, “Human Rights: The Unfinished Agenda for the New Millenium,” Vassar held a lecture presented by Harold Koh on the impact of 9/11 on American civil and political rights. The event was cosponsored and organized by the Eleanor Roosevelt Center at Vall-Kill, which aims to continue Roosevelt’s legacy by promoting human rights. As a professor of International Law at Yale University and former assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor from 1998 to 2001, Koh argued in his lecture that, “Over the course of the past year, we have slowly been compromising our civil liberties in favor of national security.”