January 11 - The Little Non-Profit That Could – CFI’s challenge to pseudoscience and alternative medicine through consumer protection laws


Presented by Nick Little
Vice President, General Counsel,
and Legal Director of the Center for Inquiry


How is so much pseudoscientific junk on store shelves? Why isn’t homeopathy illegal? Nick Little, Legal Director and General Counsel of Center for Inquiry (CFI), explains the path that CFI has taken to filing consumer protection lawsuits against retail giants CVS and Walmart for their marketing of homeopathic products.  The talk will address the limits of the law in dealing with pseudoscience, and how litigation and lobbying together can help skeptics challenge both government policies and private company promotion of pseudoscience — from climate change denial to snake oil medical products.

Nick Little is Vice President, General Counsel, and Legal Director of the Center for Inquiry. As CFI's attorney, he supervises the Center's litigation, both in the area of separation of church and state and the protection of the rights of non-believers, where he has brought multiple suits to require states to permit secular wedding celebrants, and in the area of skepticism, where he has filed CFI's groundbreaking consumer protection suit against CVS stores for their deceptive marketing of homeopathy. Educated at Oxford University, the University of  Warwick, and Vanderbilt University Law School, Nick seeks to keep CFI involved in cutting edge litigation to further its mission of a secular society based on reason, science, and humanist values.

 January 11, 2020
1:30PM

Central Library
Barbara M. Donnellan Auditorium
1015 North Quincy Street
Arlington VA

6 minute walk from Virginia Square Metro Station