Views on First Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University

Jameel Jaffer talks with Genevieve Lakier, professor of law at the University of Chicago Law School and one of the country’s leading theorists of free speech, about the climate for speech in the United States relating to the war in Israel and Gaza. How repressive is this moment, really? Is the First Amendment failing us? And what imprint will the events unfolding now leave on free speech law and culture?

Read this episode's transcript: https://knightcolumbia.org/documents/79mb6nc1za

FURTHER READING
An Open Letter to the Deans of U.S. Law Schools: https://medium.com/@uslegalscholars/an-open-letter-to-the-deans-of-u-s-law-schools-d7c9ef846c68



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Jameel Jaffer talks with Eugene Volokh, distinguished professor of law at UCLA and soon-to-be senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, about free speech on campus in the shadow of the war in Israel and Gaza. They discuss whether administrators should ban what some students describe as calls for genocide and consider what can be done to protect the space for dissent.


Views on First is brought to you by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Please subscribe and leave a review. We’d love to know what you think.
To learn more about the Knight Institute, visit our website, knightcolumbia.org, and follow us on social media.

Radhika Sainath, senior staff attorney at Palestine Legal, talks with Jameel Jaffer about the climate for speech supportive of Palestinians, defining discrimination, and the “Palestine Exception” to the First Amendment.
Views on First is brought to you by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Please subscribe and leave a review. We’d love to know what you think.
To learn more about the Knight Institute, visit our website, knightcolumbia.org, and follow us on social media.

Jameel Jaffer returns to the issue of free speech on campus with Will Creeley, legal director at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). They talk about “cancellations” before and after October 7, the difference between free speech law and free speech culture, and the free speech implications of Title VI, the law that requires universities to take action against discriminatory harassment. 
Views on First is brought to you by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Please subscribe and leave a review. We’d love to know what you think.
To learn more about the Knight Institute, visit our website, knightcolumbia.org, and follow us on social media.

What is Twitter (or any social media platform) as a matter of First Amendment law? In the first of five episodes, host Evelyn Douek begins to crack open this question, starting with perhaps the most famous Twitter handle of all — @realdonaldtrump. As president, Trump used his account to hire and fire government officials, butt heads with North Korea, and block his critics, a practice that one group of lawyers started to question.

Guests Jameel Jaffer and Katie Fallow — executive director and senior counsel at the Knight First Amendment Institute, respectively — discuss the Knight Institute’s landmark case –Knight v. Trump – establishing that the First Amendment bars public officials from blocking critics from their social media accounts. They are joined by some of the plaintiffs from that lawsuit—comedy writer Nick Jack Pappas, chocolatier and political consultant Holly Figueroa O’Reilly, and sociologist Philip Cohen, who recount their experiences of being blocked (and then unblocked) by Trump.

This episode contains strong language.
Views on First is brought to you by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Please subscribe and leave a review. We’d love to know what you think.
To learn more about the Knight Institute, visit our website, knightcolumbia.org, and follow us on social media.

Thanks to the ruling in Knight v. Trump, then-president Trump could no longer block critics on social media. Hooray! But the ruling was only the start of the story, and quickly new questions arose. How would it affect other government officials? What might it mean for the development of the law more generally? Could the ruling be used in ways that the Knight Institute team didn't expect and doesn’t agree with? In this episode, host Evelyn Douek is joined by Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman and former Twitter head of integrity Yoel Roth. Together they explore the ramifications of Knight v. Trump, and ask: Did the case establish much-needed guardrails around free speech online, or is it starting us on a slippery slope that could fundamentally change how the First Amendment applies to social media platforms?

Harp sound effect used in this episode comes from SPANAC on Free Sounds Library. Permission to use this sound is via Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.
Views on First is brought to you by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Please subscribe and leave a review. We’d love to know what you think.
To learn more about the Knight Institute, visit our website, knightcolumbia.org, and follow us on social media.