Harvey A. Silverglate

The average professional in this country wakes up in the morning, goes to work, comes home, eats dinner, and then goes to sleep, unaware that he or she has likely committed several federal crimes that day. Why? The answer lies in the very nature of modern federal criminal laws, which have exploded in number but also become impossibly broad and vague. In Three Felonies a Day, Harvey A. Silverglate reveals how federal criminal laws have become dangerously disconnected from the English common law tradition and how prosecutors can pin arguable federal crimes on any one of us, for even the most seemingly innocuous behavior. The volume of federal crimes in recent decades has increased well beyond the statute books and into the morass of the Code of Federal Regulations, handing federal prosecutors an additional trove of vague and exceedingly complex and technical prohibitions to stick on their hapless targets. The dangers spelled out in Three Felonies a Day do not apply solely to "white collar criminals," state and local politicians, and professionals. No social class or profession is safe from this troubling form of social control by the executive branch, and nothing less than the integrity of our constitutional democracy hangs in the balance.

FIRE’s Guide to Free Speech on Campus focuses on the threat to freedom of expression posed by the imposition of speech codes, under various misleading names, on campuses across the nation.

Time and again, students on our nation’s college and university campuses are subjected to campus courts where due process is completely absent. FIRE’s Guide to Due Process and Fair Procedure on Campus provides information about the appropriate and inappropriate methods by which university administrators and student judicial panels address issues of academic misdeeds and behavioral misconduct. This Guide also provides a history of how due process issues have been handled by the courts and gives several examples of institutions at which procedures are handled with the utmost concern for fairness. These will serve as models for the proper execution of campus justice. Because it is crucial to choose the most effective grounds on which to base a claim of unfairness, the Guide will introduce readers to both legal and moral arguments, explaining how these may be used on private and public campuses. Readers can expect the Guide to answer, thoroughly and compellingly, such difficult questions How can one evaluate judicial procedures at my school for objective fairness? How does one know if one’s rights have been violated? What are the best arguments to use against unfair procedures? Is the law on my side? What is the modern history and current status of the United States Supreme Court’s view of "due process of law," and how has this concept been applied to university campuses (public, private, and sectarian)? What kinds of federal and state legal doctrines, aside from federal constitutional rights, both protect and restrict the rights and powers of public, of private, and of sectarian institutions of higher learning in with regard to disciplinary and other adjudicatory proceedings?