Jameel Jaffer is the inaugural executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Under his leadership, the Institute has been a prominent and influential defender of democratic freedoms against the encroachment of authoritarianism. It has filed leading lawsuits against Trump administration policies that target free speech, academic freedom, and press freedom; last summer, it won a landmark trial on behalf of students and faculty threatened with deportation for their pro-Palestinian advocacy. The Institute has also been a principled critic of civic institutions that have capitulated to official threats and intimidation. It has sponsored research initiatives about the weaponization of federal funding and civil rights laws, and about the role of the legal profession in an era of illiberalism.

Before launching the Knight Institute in 2016, Jaffer was a litigator at the ACLU, where he argued cases involving human rights and national security after 9/11, including cases relating to surveillance, secrecy, censorship, the detention and torture of wartime prisoners, and extrajudicial killing. Jaffer led or co-led litigation teams that compelled the Bush administration to disclose the Office of Legal Counsel’s “torture memos” and the Obama administration to disclose the OLC’s “drone memos”; he also co-led the team that forced the National Security Agency to abandon its dragnet surveillance of Americans’ call records.

Courts have allowed the executive branch to invoke national security to justify withholding information from the public, including information about the most profound human rights abuses, and too often failed to provide robust protection for First Amendment freedoms, imperiling the rights of protesters, journalists, and whistleblowers. The First Amendment is increasingly serving private interests rather than democratic ones. It’s becoming alienated from the values it was meant to serve—including truth-seeking, official accountability, and, most of all, self-government. Nearly 40 states have recently enacted new legislation restricting protest rights, imposing extreme penalties for protest-related offenses, or reducing penalties for violence directed at protesters.

In the months after the October 7 attacks, there was a new wave of censorship and suppression in the United States – much of it on university campuses. Jaffer argued that universities can’t afford to treat free speech and academic freedom as negotiable. They must make a strong defense of these freedoms, because ultimately, it’s these freedoms that enable universities to play their distinctive and vital role in our society.

Jaffer’s recent writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Foreign Affairs, and the London Review of Books, as well as in Just Security, a national security blog of which he is an executive editor.

Jaffer grew up in Canada, and is a graduate of Williams College, Cambridge University, and Harvard Law School, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. He served as a law clerk to Honorable Amalya L. Kearse of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and then to Right Honorable Beverley McLachlin, Chief Justice of Canada.