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Following recent incidents of white nationalist violence, scholars and policymakers are debating the need to pass new “domestic terrorism” laws. Brennan Center for Justice Fellow and former FBI special agent Michael German will be in conversation with Stanford Law Professor Shirin Sinnar about the rising tide of white nationalist violence and how the legal community should respond to it.
Michael German is a fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty & National Security Program. He served for sixteen years as an FBI special agent, where he infiltrated multiple white supremacist groups. He left the FBI in 2004 after reporting continuing deficiencies in FBI counterterrorism operations to Congress. He is the author of Thinking Like a Terrorist and Disrupt, Discredit, and Divide: How the New FBI Damages Our Democracy. Prior to joining the Brennan Center, German served as the policy counsel for national security and privacy for the American Civil Liberties Union’s Washington legislative office.
Shirin Sinnar is Professor of Law and John A. Wilson Faculty Scholar at Stanford Law School. Her scholarship focuses on the legal treatment of political violence, the procedural dimensions of civil rights litigation, and the role of institutions in protecting individual rights and democratic values in the national security context. Her latest article is “Separate and Unequal: The Law of ‘Domestic’ and ‘International’ Terrorism,” published in the Michigan Law Review, which assesses the legal regime for domestic and international terrorism under U.S. law.
Sponsored by the American Constitution Society, the National Security & the Law Society, the Criminal Law Society, and the Stanford Criminal Justice Center.