Free speech expert @jameeljaffer.bsky.social responds to ABC's decision to pull Jimmy Kimmel Live! from the air following host Jimmy Kimmel's comments about Charlie Kirk.

Not sure Americans fully appreciate what a momentous thing it is for Canada to part ways with the United States on something like this. Yet another sign of the United States’ near-total isolation in the community of nations.

“What good is the first amendment when so many in power don’t seem to know it exists?” www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

The scandal here is that apparently 3% of media organizations watch videos like this and then write fawning stories about the president.

"More professors in the United States have been fired for controversial views in the past week than any other week in all of American history." www.insidehighered.com/opinion/colu...

Trump's defamation suit against the NYT thrown out (with leave to amend) because the complaint is "decidedly improper and impermissible" even under "the most generous and lenient application" of the federal rules. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Pretty clear illustration of "you may as well stand up for what you believe in, they're coming for you anyway."

A reminder that ABC also paid Trump $15m to settle a feeble defamation suit over George Stephanopoulos's calling Trump a rapist. www.nytimes.com/2025/02/04/o...

From an open letter that free speech groups published in May. Maybe we should have used italics, or a larger font. knightcolumbia.org/documents/dm...

"We don't want the administration to be using this tragedy as a way to go after protected speech. [...] Bondi and others have gotten a lot of blowback on this, and they should, frankly," @katiefallow.bsky.social tells @msnbc.com's @arimelber.bsky.social. WATCH below ⬇️. www.msnbc.com/the-beat-wit...

This is precisely the kind of government coercion that the First Amendment was designed to prevent — and media companies need to start standing up rather than capitulating to it.

After years of complaining about cancel culture, the current administration has taken it to a new and dangerous level by routinely threatening regulatory action against media companies unless they muzzle or fire reporters and commentators it doesn’t like.

Few companies rely on—and benefit from—our constitutional freedoms as much as media empires like Disney and Paramount. It’s astonishing to see them trading away their freedoms and ours for short-term profits.

Trump is becoming increasingly brazen in his abuse of government power to silence his critics—in part because too many of the powerful institutions that could stand up to this thuggery are capitulating instead. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/17/b...

Has authoritarian consolidation ever been accomplished so quickly, or with so little resistance?

The First Amendment forecloses the government from imprisoning and deporting people for their political advocacy. Here’s our just-filed brief in support of Mahmoud Khalil. knightcolumbia.org/content/knig...

We are witnessing a swift and sweeping consolidation of media (traditional and social) into the hands of a small number of billionaires who are actively aligned/aligning (both via free will and coercion) with Trump and his right wing political party. This is (I’ll say it) a fascist project.

I'm just an ordinary First Amendment lawyer but I'm pretty sure you can't transform "protesting the president" into criminal activity by recharacterizing it as "inflicting harm on the United States."

I believe that like his Paramount and ABC suits, the current suit is designed to furnish the pseudo legal platform for what is essentially a campaign of extortion.

Trump's lawsuit against the NYT is meant to intimidate news organizations from doing the work we need them to do--and more broadly to silence anyone who might be tempted to criticize or embarrass the president. It's a garbage lawsuit, just thuggery. knightcolumbia.org/content/trum...

RIP Robert Redford. Working with him on "Reckoning with Torture" was one of the most amazing things I got to do at the ACLU. I'm still hoping that Doug Liman will make this film one day. www.aclu.org/press-releas...

From Judith Butler's piece about UC Berkeley's turning over to the Trump admin the names of students and faculty anonymously accused of antisemitism. www.chronicle.com/article/when...

Denying passports to citizens, stripping visas, denying visitors' entry on ideological grounds - we've seen this before, in the McCarthy era. Here's Sam Lebovic, an excellent historian of this period, on efforts to restrict Americans' access to ideas from abroad: knightcolumbia.org/content/do-a...

The great free speech crusade continues

A short First Amendment 🧵: First, the professor was fired b/c he urged "revolutionary socialists" to organize: “Without organization, how can anyone expect to overthrow the most bloodthirsty, profit-driven, mad organization in the history of the world — that of the United States?”

Promising new leadership at @doctorswithoutborders.org, too. Congrats all around. www.doctorswithoutborders.org/latest/docto...

Congrats to the Malala Fund, this is a great hire. malala.org/news-and-voi...

To say that immigrants don't have the right to speak is also to say that the rest of us don't have the right to hear what they have to say. Trump is curtailing the First Amendment rights of citizens, not just of immigrants. (Not that crushing immigrants' rights isn't a terrible thing in itself!)

Yes, this definitely seems like an appropriate and constitutional use of the State Department's surveillance authorities. And definitely a fitting way to honor a person whom Trump admin officials have labeled a First Amendment hero. www.axios.com/2025/09/11/c...

A really important story with lots of illuminating detail about why Paramount was so ready to settle with Trump, and about Paramount's ongoing efforts to soften CBS's coverage of Trump and Israel. www.cjr.org/feature/cbs-...

We don’t yet know what motivated the person who shot and killed Charlie Kirk, but this kind of despicable violence has no place in our democracy. Michelle and I will be praying for Charlie’s family tonight, especially his wife Erika and their two young children.

What happened today is awful. People who fight against gun violence, people who loathe what Charlie Kirk stood for, must also condemn political violence. It’s a vicious cycle. This is a very dangerous moment.

“The government sometimes makes brief, investigative stops to check the immigration status of those who gather in locations where people are hired for day jobs such as construction, landscaping, agriculture or car washes…and who do not speak much if any English.” -Justice Kavanaugh

This is a really well-done account of Trump's ongoing war against higher education. And obviously I agree with the bottom line: "These institutions need to stop yielding, stand firm, and fight back." www.youtube.com/watch?v=xk94...

Chief Justice Roberts (2007): “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” Justice Kavanaugh (2025): ethnicity “can be a 'relevant factor' when considered along with other salient factors” in immigration stops.

In a new paper in our AI & Democratic Freedoms series, Rachel M. Kim, Blaine Kuehnert, @sethlazar.org, Ranjit Singh, & Hoda Heidari propose creating an AI Power Disparity Index, designed to measure and signal the changing distribution of power in the AI ecosystem. knightcolumbia.org/content/the-...

New from @knightcolumbia.org: Ken Stern on the academic-freedom implications of universities using the IHRA definition of antisemitism to mark the outer limits of free speech and inquiry on campus. knightcolumbia.org/content/a-ba...

I've read and coded every War Powers Report ever sent to Congress (check them all out, with interactive graphics and a searchable database 👇), and this one on #Trump's attack on an alleged drug smuggling vessel in the Caribbean stands out. I'll explain below: warpowers.lawandsecurity.org

So great to have the opportunity to publish this important and fascinating essay from @sethlazar.org and Tino Cuéllar. Part of @knightcolumbia.org's broader collaboration with Seth on Artificial Intelligence and Democratic Freedoms. knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-a...

This strike is outright murder even if you accept all the legal arguments the Obama admin made in support of its drone strikes, which you shouldn’t. www.justsecurity.org/119982/legal...

"Born a crime" is the phrase you're looking for, I think.

📍10/3 EVENT: Aryeh Neier was @aclu.org director in '77 when American Nazis demanded the right to march through Skokie. He'll reflect on the controversial case and its contemporary significance with @jameeljaffer.bsky.social. Intro remarks: Anthony Romero. Register: knightcolumbia.org/events/defen...

I expected Knight Institute v Trump to have a broad impact but it didn’t occur to me that it would be invoked in foreign courts. I get a news alert like this every few weeks. punchng.com/lawyer-sues-...

The distance between this and red-envelopes-in-bags-of-potato-chips is not that great. www.wired.com/story/dark-m...

I know that “this should be the top story” discourse is tired but “Trump Says Americans Want a Dictator, Not Democracy” really should be the top story.

It’s almost as if there were a kind of impermeable metal curtain of some kind descending around the United States.

i am afraid that university leaders see themselves as narrowly defending specific grants and policies, perhaps even asserting university prerogatives, when they are in fact, like it or not, on the front lines of defending democracy.

One thing to note about this is that it was apparently a double-tap strike: Israel killed one journalist (among others) in the first strike, waited a few minutes, and then carried out a second strike that killed first-responders and other journalists. www.reuters.com/world/middle...

Will Trump and Rubio side with the Americans exercising their First Amendment rights in NYC or with Sisi’s thugs who pulled them into the Egyptian Mission and beat them with sticks and chains? Stay tuned. theintercept.com/2025/08/22/g...

You see this in the polling of DC residents, where the share of people who say crime is "very serious" has plummeted since Trump's takeover because acknowledging crime has become a signal of alignment with the White House