NEW YORK—The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University announced today that Madhav Khosla, B.R. Ambedkar Professor of Indian Constitutional Law at Columbia Law School, will join the Institute as Senior Fellow for the next two years. Khosla’s work with the Institute will focus on the role of the legal profession in an era of rising authoritarianism.
“We’ve long admired Professor Khosla’s work and are thrilled to have this opportunity to work with him on this urgent project about the role of the legal profession in the defense of democratic freedom,” said Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute. “We hope this initiative will spur not just deeper thinking but more effective action as well.”
Khosla will begin his term as Senior Fellow immediately. His project will explore how the changing identity of the legal profession has shifted its internal ethical structures, and how bar associations maintain—or lose—their independence in inhospitable political environments. It seeks to generate new scholarship that will galvanize members of the legal profession in the United States and abroad to reflect on their roles in defending the rule of law and democratic values, and help them be more effective at doing so. The project will also include several public events with prominent jurists in fall 2026 and spring 2027, with exact dates to be announced.
“This moment of encroaching authoritarianism requires each of us to ask what we can do to protect democracy,” said Katy Glenn Bass, research director at the Knight Institute. “With this project, we hope to focus attention on the crucial role that lawyers can play in preserving democratic freedoms and institutions, and to highlight the courage of the many lawyers who have already dedicated their careers to doing so.”
“Much of contemporary scholarship about authoritarianism focuses on the weaponization of the law for anti-democratic means but overlooks the role that the legal profession itself can play in democratic backsliding,” Madhav Khosla said. “Understanding the way that the legal profession can shift from being a site of resistance to a vehicle for authoritarianism requires examining shifts in the identity of the profession, as well as its ability to self-regulate. I look forward to exploring these questions with the Knight Institute.”
Current and previous visitors at the Knight Institute include Olivier Sylvain, a professor at Fordham Law School, Seth Lazar, a professor of philosophy at the Australian National University, RonNell Andersen Jones, a law professor at the University of Utah, Sonja R. West, a law professor at the University of Georgia, Arvind Narayanan, a professor of computer science at Princeton University, J. Nathan Matias, an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Cornell University, Genevieve Lakier, a professor of law at the University of Chicago, and Ethan Zuckerman, associate professor of public policy, information, and communication at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and director of the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure. More information about their projects as well as other past visitors is available here.
For more information, contact: Adriana Lamirande, [email protected]