Jameel Jaffer

Economist Amartya Sen won a Nobel in part for asking: Why did India avoid the mass famines that killed tens of millions in China? His answer: a free press. Journalists could expose suffering and shame governments into action. Silence and avoidance, by contrast, can be deadly.

Trump’s Efforts to Control Information Echo an Authoritarian Playbook

This is a very good (but also very disturbing) survey from @peterbakernyt.bsky.social of the Trump admin policies that are intended to deprive the public of accurate info about government. I might have also included the expulsions from the White House press pool.
www.nytimes.com/2025/08/03/u...

If your political representatives voted for this absolute stupidity, please do everything you can to oust them at the next opportunity. cpb.org/pressroom/Co...

How Higher Ed Got Jawboned Podcast Episode · The Bully's Pulpit: Trump v. The First Amendment · 07/31/2025 · 46m

LISTEN to today's episode with First Amendment legal scholar @genevievelakier.bsky.social and Wesleyan President Michael Roth discussing the Trump administration’s #jawboning and extortion campaign against U.S. universities.

More on the conversation below. ⬇️ podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/h...

“Not since the McCarthy era have we seen immigrants subject to such an intense campaign of speech repression,” says @ramyakrishnan.bsky.social. Good overview of the history of ideological exclusion and deportation in the U.S. and its chilling effects in @lawfaremedia.org.

Sorry for the big words.

The Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma has spun out of Columbia University and has become the Global Center for Journalism and Trauma.

Grateful for all they do to support the well-being of journalists worldwide. They're on Bluesky at @traumajournalism.bsky.social

createsend.com/t/r-349259D5...

The people celebrating this don't want Columbia to be a serious university. They want faculty to be propagandists, and students to passively absorb the orthodoxies that their parents never had the courage to question. They want Columbia to be parochial, insular, and stultifying.

Wow. A group of top scholars at Harvard just sent a letter to its president, Alan Garber, warning against surrendering to Trump.

Signatories include Steven Levitsky, Dani Rodrik, Ryan Enos, Theda Skocpol, and Steven Walt.

Someone forwarded it to me. Read it here:

Trump’s war on Big Law leads firms to retreat from ’pro bono’ work for underdogs Major law firms are scaling back the free work they do for advocacy groups fighting the government in the wake of Donald Trump’s attacks on the profession. Interviews with over 60 lawyers and 30 nonprofits show legal aid groups now have fewer resources to defend the vulnerable.

Thank you to the smaller law firms that are helping us defend the freedoms of speech and the press against the Trump admin's predations. Especially grateful right now to Sher Tremonte, Selendy Gay, and Zimmer Citron & Clarke. We couldn't do our work without them. www.reuters.com/investigatio...

Judge Bars Trump Administration From Punishing 2 Law Professors for I.C.C. Work

The President doesn’t get to decide which human rights advocacy is permissible. An important First Amendment victory in the SDNY. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/30/u...

In paragraph 11, the story finally mentions the US’s role in arming Israel and protecting it from diplomatic sanction. This is how the topic is addressed: What an embarrassment.

I’ve forgotten, was the US supplying billions of dollars in weapons to any of these regimes?

This framing is absurd. The moral crisis here is *caused* by US policy. And in which universe is Trump “wringing his hands” rather than continuing to supply weapons and diplomatic cover to a government engaged in a campaign of deliberate, mass starvation? www.nytimes.com/2025/07/30/u...

The Cowardice of Senate Democrats Made Emil Bove’s Confirmation Possible Senate Democrats could have confirmed Biden nominee Adeel Mangi to the Third Circuit last year. They caved to a disgraceful right-wing smear campaign instead.

Emil Bove's confirmation was only possible because Democrats caved to a vile right-wing smear campaign of Adeel Mangi, who would have been the first Muslim appeals court judge, when Biden nominated him for the same seat last year. Absolutely disgraceful. Bove's confirmation is on them, too.

“A Bad Deal With Trump Will Not Protect Us”—excellent letter in the Harvard Crimson addressed to President Alan Garber.
www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

| Knight First Amendment Institute

Recent law grads — we're now hiring for legal fellows to begin in Fall 2025. Our First Amendment rights are under daily assault. I hope you'll consider applying to work with us at @knightcolumbia.org to push back.

knightcolumbia.org/page/legal-f...

Text of the docket from AlHathloul v. Dark Matter indicating that the court has denied the defendant's motion to dismiss the CFAA claims in the case.

NEWS: Loujain AlHathloul's spyware lawsuit against Dark Matter survives a motion to dismiss, and the CFAA claims will proceed in US courts. That is a huge win! Order is temporarily sealed -- we will publish more when it is unsealed. For background: www.eff.org/cases/alhath...

Has the US cancelled free speech? Why are US professors suing to challenge the Trump administration’s crackdown on pro-Palestine activism?

"If the First Amendment protects anything at all, it protects people against imprisonment based on their political views. But that's what's going on here." Watch @jameeljaffer.bsky.social discuss AAUP v. Rubio on @aljazeeraenglish.bsky.social's The Bottom Line. www.aljazeera.com/video/the-bo...

"We never thought we'd write this post. But we never thought this would be our reality."

Threat of Dissent — Harvard University Press “Suspicion of foreigners goes back to the earliest days of the republic…Kraut traces how different ideologies would be considered intolerably dangerous according to the dominant fears of a given era. ...

For those following the AAUP v. Rubio trial on the chilling effect of ideological deportation, learn more about the history of ideological deportation (and exclusion) in the US in my book "Threat of Dissent," which traces that history from 1798 to Trump 1.0. 🗃️

www.hup.harvard.edu/books/978067...

As the author of the law that empowers the U.S. government to sanction Chinese and other officials for cracking down on free speech in Hong Kong, I agree with Rubio.

Unfortunately, he has ZERO credibility after he locked up students in the U.S. for exercising free speech. (1/1)

This is good--worth watching, "Mass moral uprising" is exactly what's needed now. "If you want to keep [your freedoms], none of us can sit this one out."

Everyone is celebrating him for his (obviously wonderful) songs but I am also celebrating him for releasing all his works into the public domain and insisting he retained no copyrights over any of it.

5 questions for Danielle Citron

Read this interview with a personal hero, Professor @daniellecitron.bsky.social: "we have essentially presumed that data collection is a good...We have long ignored this important inclination that collection itself is endangering our privacy and civil liberties" www.politico.com/newsletters/...

Presumably the theory here is that if you call the babysitter an "ombudsman," you sidestep the First Amendment questions that might arise if you called him a "censor."

F.C.C. Approves Skydance’s Merger With Paramount

The quo for the quid. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/24/b...

Opinion | This Is Not a Moment to Settle With Trump

I wrote this about the press, but I believe the argument applies with equal force to law firms, museums, and universities. www.nytimes.com/2025/02/04/o...

We learned a lot about the Holocaust in Hebrew school and the mantra of "never again." I think most people understood "never again" to mean never again, but Netanyahu and his patrons (there and here) distorted that into "never again, unless we're the ones doing the butchering." Which is nauseating.

I hope Suresh Naidu is wrong, but I’m pretty sure he’s right—Columbia’s settlement with Trump is unlikely to stick: www.nytimes.com/2025/07/23/o...