The University of Colorado announced that law professor John C. Eastman and journalist Robert W. Merry will be Visiting Scholars in Conservative Thought and Policy for the 2020-21 school year. The positions are reserved for “highly visible” academics who are “deeply engaged in either the analytical scholarship or practice of conservative thinking and policymaking or both.”

“These distinguished scholars bring an exciting mix of expertise in constitutional law, journalism and political science to the Benson Center and the CU-Boulder campus,” said Ben Hale, interim director of the center.

Eastman studies constitutional law and, in particular, religious freedom. He has advocated in the past for the overturn of birthright citizenship, which is the interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment that grants American citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil.

“The notion that the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment, when seeking to guarantee the right of citizenship to former slaves, also sought to guarantee citizenship to the children of enemies of the United States who were in its territory illegally is simply too absurd to be a credible interpretation of the Citizenship Clause,” Eastman wrote in 2006.

Merry was a reporter and editor for The Denver Post, after which he worked for The National Observer and The Wall Street Journal covering government and politics. He has written five books about American history.

Elizabeth C’de Baca Eastman will also join the university as senior scholar in residence at the Bruce D. Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization. She has taught in the fields of political science, political philosophy, history, liberal studies and philosophy.