Jameel Jaffer
Executive Director

Jameel Jaffer is the executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Under his leadership, the Institute has filed precedent-setting litigation, undertaken major interdisciplinary research initiatives, and become an influential voice in debates about the freedoms of speech and the press in the digital age.
Until August 2016, Jaffer served as deputy legal director at the ACLU, where he oversaw the organization’s work on free speech, privacy, technology, national security, and international human rights. He litigated many significant post-9/11 cases involving human rights and national security, including cases relating to surveillance, secrecy, censorship, interrogation, detention, and extrajudicial killing. He led or co-led litigation teams that compelled the Bush administration to disclose the “torture memos,” compelled the Obama administration to disclose the “drone memos,” and compelled the National Security Agency to abandon its dragnet surveillance of Americans’ call records. He also 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 writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and Foreign Affairs. He is an executive editor of Just Security, a national security blog, and his most recent book, The Drone Memos, was one of The Guardian’s “Best Books of 2016.” In recent years 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; and the Salant Lecture on Freedom of the Press at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center. He was also the honoree at the Columbia Law Review’s annual banquet in 2015, and the Harvard Law Review’s annual banquet in 2022. He was named to Foreign Policy’s “Top 100 Global Thinkers” list in 2012, received the Vox Libera award from Canadian Journalists for Free Expression in 2015, and was inducted into the Newseum’s Freedom of Information “Hall of Fame” in 2016.
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. He currently serves on the board of the Pierre Elliot Trudeau Foundation, on the advisory board of First Look Media’s Press Freedom Litigation Fund, and on the advisory board for the Center for Democracy and Technology. In recent years 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.
Contact
Selected Projects
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Knight Institute v. Trump
A lawsuit challenging President Trump's blocking of critics on Twitter
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Doc Society v. Blinken
A lawsuit challenging the State Department’s social media registration requirement
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Edgar v. Haines
A lawsuit challenging the government's system of "prepublication review"
Selected Work
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When Social Media Regulation Meets the First Amendment
Decoder
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What We Owe Whistleblowers
National Security, Leaks & Freedom of the Press
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Deep Dive
Facebook’s ‘Supreme Court’ Faces Its First Major Test
The New York Times
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Analysis
Clearview AI’s First Amendment Theory Threatens Privacy—and Free Speech, Too
Slate
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The Espionage Act and a Growing Threat to Press Freedom
The New Yorker

Contact
Selected Projects
-
Knight Institute v. Trump
A lawsuit challenging President Trump's blocking of critics on Twitter
-
Doc Society v. Blinken
A lawsuit challenging the State Department’s social media registration requirement
-
Edgar v. Haines
A lawsuit challenging the government's system of "prepublication review"
Writings & Appearances
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Deep Dive
A Digital Sphere that Serves Democracy
At 2022 Beaverbrook Lecture, Jameel Jaffer assesses watershed cases on regulation of social media
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Deep Dive
The Espionage Act Has Been Abused — But Not in Trump’s Case
Reforms to the law are long overdue, but they have nothing to do with the Mar-a-Lago search
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Deep Dive
One More Thing About Herbert v. Lando
Technology companies and some legal scholars are relying heavily on the Supreme Court’s 1979 decision in Herbert v. Lando to argue that the First Amendment precludes legislatures from imposing transparency mandates on social media companies. This reliance is misplaced. As...
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