Jameel Jaffer is the inaugural executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Under his leadership, the Institute has become an influential voice in debates about the freedoms of speech and the press in the digital age. Its litigation program has established important precedents relating to the application of the “public forum” doctrine to government officials’ social media accounts, the free speech rights of foreign citizens, and the right of the public to access government documents and proceedings. Its research program has published leading research on the regulation of mis- and disinformation, free speech and inequality, the influence of social media platforms over public discourse, the implications of artificial intelligence for democratic freedoms, and the role of the legal profession in an era of authoritarianism.

 Before launching the Knight Institute in 2016, Jaffer was a litigator at the ACLU, where he argued some of the most consequential post-9/11 cases involving human rights and national security, including cases relating to surveillance, secrecy, censorship, the detention and torture of wartime prisoners, and extrajudicial killing. He 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. He played a major part in the ACLU’s decision to take on the representation of Edward Snowden. The New York Times described one of his transparency cases as “among the most successful in the history of public disclosure.”

 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. He has delivered the inaugural Peter Zenger Lecture at Columbia Journalism School; the Or’ Emet Lecture at York University’s Osgoode Hall Law School; the Eva Holtby Lecture on Contemporary Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum; the Salant Lecture on Freedom of the Press at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center; and the Horace E. Read Memorial Lecture at Dalhousie University’s Schulich School of Law. He was the honoree at the Harvard Law Review’s annual banquet in 2022, and Williams College awarded him a Bicentennial Medal in 2025.

Jaffer 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. In recent years he has served on the board of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation and the advisory boards of First Look Media’s Press Freedom Litigation Fund, the Center for Democracy and Technology, and the Allard Prize. He has also served as a commissioner of the Canadian Commission on Democratic Expression and as a member of the Aspen Institute Commission on Information Disorder. He was a distinguished fellow at the University of Toronto’s Munk School from 2016 to 2021 and a fellow at the Open Society Foundations in 2013.