Valerie Plame Comes Out of the Cold to UCI Law

​Valerie Plame, whose career as an undercover for the CIA ended when the Bush White House blew her cover in 2003, comes to the UC Irvine School of Law Feb. 17 to give a free talk about her experiences.

Now going by Valerie Elise Plame Wilson, to reflect her marriage to former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, the 48-year-old wrote about her spook career in 2007's Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House.

Doug Liman's Fair Game, a 2010 film starring Naomi Watts and Sean Penn that was based on the memoirs of Plame and Wilson, received generally positive reviews from critics. It came out on DVD and Blu-ray last March.

Back to real life, the couple filed Wilson vs. Cheney in 2006 against Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby and Karl Rove (later adding Richard Armitage, who leaked the CIA undercover's identity to conservative columnist Robert Novak). President Barack Obama's Justice Department later agreed with George W. Bush's Justice Department that the couple have no standing to sue. Wilson and Plame have vowed to continue fighting to the U.S. Supreme Court if necessary.

Meanwhile, Plame has turned her writing talents to fiction, authoring a series of spy novels with mystery writer Sarah Lovett for Blue Rider Press.

Plame is scheduled to appear from noon to 1 p.m. at UCI's EDU-1111, Seminar Room 101. While it's free to attend, you must RSVP online.

Hasen

​Her appearance will be preceded by other free School of Law seminars by Professor Rick Hasen, an election law specialist, and trial lawyer Charles Ogletree Jr., the founder of Harvard Law School's Houston Institute for Race and Justice.

Hasen speaks 4:30-5:30 p.m. Monday on "The Voting Wars," which explores why nearly a dozen years after the controversial 2000 U.S. presidential election between Bush and Al Gore, the problems with how we run our elections are still not fixed. The Chancellor's Chair Lecture is based on Hasen's upcoming book The Voting Wars: From Florida 2000 to the Next Election Meltdown, which is scheduled to be published this summer by Yale University Press. It's in the same room as the Plame seminar (RSVP online).

Ogletree

​Ogletree's Al Meyerhoff Public Interest Lecture, which is named after a famed labor, environment and civil rights lawyer, is titled "President Obama's Election and Pursuit of a Post Racial America." Considered "one of the most tenacious and successful trial lawyers in the United States," according to the law school, Ogletree is the Jesse Climenko Professor of Law at Harvard University, an advocate of a defendant's right to a fair trial within the American justice system, and the creator of a college scholarship fund for students in his hometown of Merced. His lecture runs from 4-5 p.m. next Wednesday, Feb. 15, also in the same seminar room as the other two (RSVP online).