Views on First

The Knight Institute is launching a new podcast on May 16, with new episodes every Friday. Look for “The Bully’s Pulpit: Trump v. The First Amendment” wherever you get podcasts. “The Bully’s Pulpit” will follow the Trump administration’s assault on the freedoms of speech and the press and will feature the people, communities, and institutions that are fighting back. Hosted by legal journalist Cristian Farias and advocates from the ...

From the first Trump administration to the Biden administration, the fight to ban TikTok has cut across conventional partisan and ideological lines. In this episode, host Ramya Krishnan explores the ban as an affront to our First Amendment right to receive information and ideas from abroad. Georgetown Law professor and tech regulation expert Anupam Chander highlights the government’s glaring lack of evidence that TikTok poses a nat...

It's not new for repressive governments to go after journalists. What is new is the ease with which they can do so — by turning journalists’ own phones against them. Host Alex Abdo explores the pernicious commercial spyware industry, and how repressive governments around the world use spyware to target journalists and activists. John Scott-Railton, senior researcher at The Citizen Lab, speaks about the technical capacities of ...

Citizen or not—anyone can be searched at the border. Border agents may search messages, photos, and other intimate data on your personal phone, tablet, or other devices. Host Ramya Krishnan hears from documentary filmmaker Akram Shibly about his experience being detained and having his phone searched—twice—by officials at the U.S.-Canadian border. Knight Institute attorney Stephanie Krent addresses the constitutionality of such sea...

Dating back to the Obama administration, the U.S. government has been using its authority over the border to justify the surveillance of visitors’ and immigrants’ social media accounts. Host Anna Diakun explores the chilling effect this digital surveillance has on the speech and associations of millions of people around the world. Guest Faiza Patel, Senior Director of the Liberty and National Security Project at the Brennan Center ...

From the war on anarchism to President Trump’s extreme vetting policies, the U.S. government’s practice of using the border as a justification to exclude ideas considered “dangerous” is as American as apple pie. In the first episode of “Views on First: Speech & the Border,” host George Wang invites lawyer and historian Julia Rose Kraut to explore the history of ideological exclusion and the government’s authority to bar individ...

We’ve all been hearing a lot about “the border”—in news headlines, candidates’ speeches, and political debates. On our third season of “Views on First: Speech & the Border” we examine the frontiers of censorship and surveillance. Today, the U.S. government uses its authority over the border to justify the exclusion of certain people and ideas, the surveillance of social media, the warrantless search of travelers’ laptops and ce...

Harvard Law School’s Noah Feldman talks with Jameel Jaffer about whether and when universities should issue statements about social and political issues, and about the pros and cons of institutional neutrality.

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Cornell Law School’s Michael Dorf talks with Jameel Jaffer about how federal anti-discrimination law is shaping universities’ responses to pro-Palestinian protests on campus, and about the tensions between anti-discrimination law and the First Amendment.

Views on First is brought to you by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Please subscribe and leave a review. We’d love to know what you think.

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Deborah Brown of Human Rights Watch and Evelyn Douek of Stanford Law talk with Jameel Jaffer about the role that social media platforms are playing in shaping, suppressing, and distorting public discourse about the war. 

Views on First is brought to you by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Please subscribe and leave a review. We’d love to know what you think.

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Jelani Cobb, Dean of Columbia’s Journalism School, and Isabella Ramirez, Editor in Chief of the Columbia Daily Spectator, talk with Jameel Jaffer about the crisis at Columbia, and about the challenges of reporting on it.

Views on First is brought to you by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Please subscribe and leave a review. We’d love to know what you think.

To learn more about the Knight Institute, visi...

Jameel Jaffer returns to the issue of free speech on campus with Jeannie Suk Gersen, professor of law at Harvard, contributing writer to the New Yorker, founding member of the Academic Freedom Alliance, and co-president of the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard. They talk about the challenges facing academic freedom on college campuses since October 7th. 

Views on First is brought to you by the Knight First Amendment Institute a...

Jameel Jaffer returns to the issue of free speech on campus with Will Creeley, legal director at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). They talk about “cancellations” before and after October 7, the difference between free speech law and free speech culture, and the free speech implications of Title VI, the law that requires universities to take action against discriminatory harassment. 

Views on First is broug...

Radhika Sainath, senior staff attorney at Palestine Legal, talks with Jameel Jaffer about the climate for speech supportive of Palestinians, defining discrimination, and the “Palestine Exception” to the First Amendment.

Views on First is brought to you by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Please subscribe and leave a review. We’d love to know what you think.

To learn more about the Knight Institute, visit...

Jameel Jaffer talks with Eugene Volokh, distinguished professor of law at UCLA and soon-to-be senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, about free speech on campus in the shadow of the war in Israel and Gaza. They discuss whether administrators should ban what some students describe as calls for genocide and consider what can be done to protect the space for dissent.

Views on First is brought to you by the Knight First Amen...