Civil liberties lawyer shares expertise in Winter Dialogue with the Dean

“Free speech is impossible to disentangle from democracy,” said Jameel Jaffer, one of our country’s foremost civil liberties legal advocates. “Free speech is why democracy works.”

This statement anchored Jaffer’s participation in the latest installment of Dialogue with the Dean and reflects a central theme of his scholarship and his career.

Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and former deputy legal director of the ACLU, was Dean E. Patrick Johnson’s second Dialogue guest of the 2025-2026 academic year. Jaffer joined the February 24 conversation via Zoom, having been grounded in New York by heavy snowfall. He discussed historical and contemporary challenges to civil liberties and the role of institutions in responding to such pressures.

“If we let the First Amendment essentially disappear or disappear as a result of our failure to defend it,” Jaffer said, “our democracy will disappear.”

Jaffer is watching current events closely, but then again, he always has. The Canadian national and Harvard Law School graduate didn’t consider going into civil liberties law until 9/11, after which he witnessed significant shifts in government policies regarding due process for non-citizens. He left his corporate law firm and joined the ACLU in 2002.

His 14-year ACLU litigation career included a successful challenge to the USA Patriot Act; a case to compel the George W. Bush administration to release detainee mistreatment photos taken at Guantanamo Bay and CIA facilities; and a case that ultimately led to the Obama administration releasing what became known as the “drone memos.”

“You can’t say, ‘I believe in civil liberties but not for that group; you really have to defend the general principle if you want to apply the general principle,” he said. “We don’t need the First Amendment to protect popular speech; we need it to protect unpopular speech.”

Jaffer was tapped to be the inaugural director of the Knight Institute in 2016. Knight’s mission is to defend freedom of speech and the press in the digital age using education, advocacy, research and the law. Jaffer addressed how institutions protected by the First Amendment are reacting to political threats, actions he calls dispiriting and that have no basis in the law.

“If you run a news organization or run another institution important to our democracy, it’s your job to defend democratic freedoms,” he said. “That’s the bargain with the First Amendment…you have an obligation as a citizen and a leader of a news organization to stand up for those rights.”

To hear more from Jaffer about current debates around free expression and the role of institutions, watch the February 24, 2026, installment of Dialogue with the Dean below.

The thoughts and views of Dialogue with the Dean guests are their own and do not represent those of the University or the School of Communication.