Jameel Jaffer

Jameel Jaffer is the inaugural director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, which was founded by Columbia University and the Knight Foundation in 2016 to promote the freedoms of speech and the press in the digital age. He previously served in various leadership positions at the American Civil Liberties Union, ultimately overseeing the organization’s work on democracy, free speech, privacy, technology, national security, and international human rights.

Jaffer has argued human rights and civil liberties cases in multiple appeals courts as well as the U.S. Supreme Court, and has testified many times before the U.S. Congress. He has edited two books—one about the Bush administration’s interrogation and detention policies (co-edited with Amrit Singh) and another about the Obama administration’s use of drones to carry out extrajudicial killings overseas. He delivered the keynote address at the Harvard Law Review’s annual gala in 2022, the Salant Lecture on Freedom of the Press at Harvard’s Kennedy School in 2017, and the Peter Zenger Lecture at Columbia Law School in 2016. His recent writing has been published in New York Review of Books, the New York Times, the Guardian, and Foreign Affairs.

 Early in his legal career, Jaffer served as a law clerk to Honorable Amalya L. Kearse of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and then as a law clerk to the Right Honorable Beverley McLachlin, Chief Justice of Canada.