The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University announced today that Jamal Greene, Dwight Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, will join the Institute as a visiting scholar. Greene, whose scholarship has focused on constitutional law and theories of constitutional interpretation, will be affiliated with the Institute effective immediately through the end of the 2018–2019 academic year.

“Professor Greene is an original and brilliant scholar of constitutionalism and constitutional law, and I couldn’t be more excited to welcome him to the Knight Institute,” said Jameel Jaffer, the Knight Institute’s executive director. “I look forward to having Professor Greene engaged with all aspects of the Institute’s work, and to working closely with him in commissioning new research relating to free speech and new communications platforms.”

Greene’s scholarship focuses on the structure of legal and constitutional argument, and he is the author of more than 30 law review articles and a forthcoming book on the nature of rights adjudication. He served as a law clerk to the Honorable Guido Calabresi on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and for the Honorable John Paul Stevens on the U.S. Supreme Court. During his affiliation with the Institute, Professor Greene will oversee a paper series in which leading legal scholars, technologists, journalists, and business executives will consider what legal frameworks and institutions would best serve our society in an era in which so much speech takes place on infrastructure owned by private actors. The Knight Institute will publish essays from the series and host a series of convenings relating to them.

"Technological change has transformed our speech environment in ways we’re only beginning to understand."    

“Technological change has transformed our speech environment in ways we’re only beginning to understand,” said Greene. “This series will give serious thinkers and professionals a chance to step back and think more deeply about the values free speech is designed to promote and how the First Amendment can remain vibrant into the 21st century.”

Professor Greene will be the Knight Institute’s second visiting scholar; the Institute’s inaugural visiting scholar, David Pozen, will complete his one-year tenure with the Institute this summer. During his affiliation with the Institute, Professor Pozen has commissioned and edited a series of essays exploring new structural threats to freedom of expression in the digital age. Pozen also worked with Jaffer and Institute staff on a range of strategic issues and played a lead role in conceiving and organizing “A First Amendment for All?,” a symposium that the Institute hosted with the Columbia Law Review and the Center for Constitutional Governance in March. That symposium brought together dozens of leading legal scholars and an audience of several hundred to examine the role of the First Amendment in an age of inequality.

About the Knight Institute

The Knight First Amendment Institute is a non-partisan, not-for-profit organization established by Columbia University and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to defend the freedoms of speech and press in the digital age through strategic litigation, research, and public education. Its aim is to promote a system of free expression that is open and inclusive, that broadens and elevates public discourse, and that fosters creativity, accountability, and effective self-government.