Dr. Alasdair Roberts is speaking as part of the "Information in Society" speaker series. A lunch discussion and afternoon office hour are scheduled before the lecture, and the lecture will be recorded and archived online.

Lecture Abstract: The last decade has seen an extraordinary increase in the number of countries that have adopted laws like the US' Freedom of Information Act. Some people say that legal and technological change is producing a new age of transparency. But there are also complaints about new levels of secrecy -- justified in the name of executive privilege, national security, and corporate confidentiality. How do we make sense of these conflicting claims? Is governmental secrecy on the decline or getting worse?

Speaker Biography: Dr. Alasdair Roberts is the Jerome L. Rappaport Professor of Law and Public Policy at Suffolk University Law School. Dr. Roberts writes extensively on problems of governance, law, and public policy. He is the author of Blacked Out: Government Secrecy in the Information Age, and most recently The Collapse of Fortress Bush: The Crisis of Authority in American Government. Professor Roberts was elected as a fellow of the US National Academy of Public Administration in 2007. He is also an Honorary Senior Research Fellow of the School of Public Policy, University College London. He has had fellowships with the Open Society Institute and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Dr. Roberts received a JD from the University of Toronto in 1984, a Master's degree in Public Policy from Harvard University in 1986, and a Ph.D. in Public Policy from Harvard University in 1994.