Jameel Jaffer

Jameel Jaffer is the inaugural director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, which was established by Columbia University and the Knight Foundation to promote the freedoms of speech and the press in the digital age. Since its inception in 2016, the Institute has taken on major litigation and research projects relating to free speech online, social media, artificial intelligence, new surveillance technology, algorithmic amplification, wartime censorship, the rights of whistleblowers, and government secrecy.

Between 2002 and 2016, Jaffer was a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, ultimately overseeing all of the organization’s work on free speech, privacy, technology, national security, and international human rights. 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 forced the National Security Agency to abandon its dragnet surveillance of Americans’ call records. He 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 recent writing has appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, Le Monde, the Guardian, and Foreign Affairs. He is an executive editor of Just Security, a national security blog, and his book, The Drone Memos, was one of the Guardian’s “Best Books of 2016.” 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. 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.

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.