Vincent Blasi, a law scholar and advocate and defender of the First Amendment right to free speech, will deliver this years annual Frank Irvine Lecture at Cornell University Law School Monday, Oct. 23. His talk is titled "School Vouchers and Religious Liberty."

The talk will be at 4 p.m. in the MacDonald Moot Court Room of Myron Taylor Hall and is free and open to the public.

Blasi is the Corliss Lamont Professor of Civil Liberties at Columbia Law School as well as the David Lurton Massee Jr. Professor of Law at the University of Virginia Law School. He joined Columbias faculty in 1983 and Virginias in 1998.

He is the author of Law and Liberalism in the 1980s (Columbia University Press, 1991) and co-author (with Anthony Lewis) of The Burger Court: The Counter Revolution That Wasnt (Yale University Press, paperback 1986). In addition, he has written numerous articles on the First Amendment, among them "Free Speech and Good Character," delivered as the Nimer lecture at the University of California-Los Angeles Law School and published in 1999 in the UCLA law review, and "Miltons Areopagitica and the Modern First Amendment," delivered as the Elliot lecture at Yale University Law School and published by Yale in 1996.

Blasi earned a B.A. in economics at Northwestern University in 1964 and a J.D. degree at the University of Chicago Law School in 1967. In addition to the First Amendment, he is interested in constitutional law and torts.

The Irvine lecture series was established at Cornell Law School in 1913 in honor of Judge Frank Irvine, former dean of the law school, by the Conkling Inn of the legal fraternity Phi Delta Phi. The series offers lectures on legal topics by speakers of national stature. Past speakers have included Harvard economics and philosophy professor Amartya Sen, who spoke on human rights in developing countries, and University of Michigan law professor Yale Kamisar, who discussed whether Congress could overrule the Supreme Courts historic Miranda ruling.