14-05-2023 00:24 Government Lies | Knight First Amendment Institute

Piotr Szyhalski

EVENT

Government Lies
Is it possible to prevent the government’s lies or limit their harms?

FRIDAY 1/28/2022

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14-05-2023 00:24 Government Lies | Knight First Amendment Institute

Government Lies: Is it possible to prevent …

Of all the kinds of lies that proliferate in the public sphere, perhaps the most dangerous
to the functioning of democratic government are government lies. This is because when
the government lies, it threatens the ability of the people to perform their basic
democratic function: namely, to judge whether their elected representatives are
representing their interests satisfactorily. Government lies are also, however, harder to
regulate than other kinds. The courts have almost unequivocally rejected the idea that
constitutional law should do anything to constrain the government’s capacity to lie. The
result is that what mechanisms exist to limit government lying—whistleblower laws, right
of information statutes, norms forbidding political interference with bureaucratic
practice—are entirely a product of legislative invention or institutional self-regulation.
Are there reforms, either constitutional, legislative, or institutional, that could be made
to limit the government’s capacity to lie or to mitigate the harms created by government
lies? What might it do to preserve the integrity of the information that the federal and
state bureaucracies produce? In an intensely partisan political environment, is it possible
to prevent the government’s lies or limit their harms?

Schedule
FRIDAY JANUARY 28
ONLINE

1:00PM – 2:30PM EST

Featuring
Hina Shamsi, ACLU

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Helen Norton, Colorado Law

David Luban, Georgetown Law

Wendy Wagner, Texas Law

Moderated by 
Genevieve Lakier, Knight First Amendment Institute

Speakers

Hina Shamsi Helen Norton David Luban

University of Colorado School of
Law

Wendy Wagner Genevieve Lakier

Knight Institute Senior Visiting
Research Scholar 2021-2022;
University of Chicago Law
School

EVENT MATERIALS
Lies and the Law

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Related Lies and the Law blogs

Thoughts on Government Lies
David Luban

What the Constitution Can—and Can’t—Do About the Government’s Lies

Helen Norton

The Most Troubling Government Lie? The "Presumptive" One

Wendy Wagner

Follow the conversation #LiesandtheLaw

FILED UNDER EVENT

TAGS DEMOCRACY / ELECTIONS / MIS/DISINFORMATION / LIES AND THE LAW EVENTS

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