NEW YORK—The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University today announced a multi-year initiative about the legal profession and authoritarianism—an initiative that will encompass public events in the United States and abroad, closed convenings of scholars and litigators, and the publication of new scholarship. A collaboration with Madhav Khosla, B.R. Ambedkar Professor of Indian Constitutional Law at Columbia Law School, the initiative is an effort to further a transnational conversation about the special responsibility of lawyers in the defense of democratic freedoms and institutions.
“Lawyers have an essential role to play in the defense of democracy against authoritarian leaders and movements,” said Jameel Jaffer, the Knight Institute’s executive director. “This initiative is meant to spur deeper thinking about that role, and more effective action as well.”
As part of the new initiative, the Knight Institute will host a public event at Columbia Law School in Spring 2026, a podcast hosted by Khosla and the Institute’s Research Director Katy Glenn Bass, a workshop for scholars in New York, and public symposia in Washington, DC, and London, England. Also in connection with the new initiative, the Institute today issued a call for proposals for an essay series on “Lawyering Without Law.” The series will explore, among other questions, how differing conceptions of the legal profession contribute to lawyers’ role in either resisting authoritarianism or accommodating it, and the role of bar associations and professional self-regulation in shaping the legal profession’s understanding of its relationship to democracy.
“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,” said Khosla, who is serving as Senior Fellow at the Knight Institute for two academic years. “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.”
The questions posed by the new initiative are familiar to lawyers in many other societies, but not to most lawyers in the United States. These questions have become more salient here, and more pressing, because of Trump administration threats directed at the legal profession and the way that lawyers have responded to those threats. Over the past ten months, the Trump administration has sanctioned law firms whose clients the president views as political enemies, suspending their security clearances, threatening to cancel their government contracts, and launching intrusive investigations of their DEI-related employment practices. Four law firms have successfully challenged the sanctions in court, but others have reached settlements with the administration.
“American lawyers can learn a lot from the experiences of lawyers in other societies in which authoritarian movements threaten democratic freedoms,” said Glenn Bass. “We’re eager to draw on the experiences and knowledge of legal scholars, litigators, and judges who have already confronted the kinds of questions American lawyers are confronting now.”
The Knight Institute filed amicus briefs in support of the law firms that challenged the Trump administration sanctions in court, and in October it filed a lawsuit to compel the administration to disclose the settlements it reached with other firms.
For more information, contact: Adriana Lamirande, [email protected]