Views on First

Views on First

“Views on First” is the Knight First Amendment Institute’s flagship podcast. Each season, we invite leading legal scholars, practitioners, tech policy experts, and others to join us in conversations about some of the most pressing First Amendment issues in the ever-shifting expressive landscape of the digital age. “Views on First: Season 1” won a 2024 Anthem Award Silver Medal and 2023 Signal Listener’s Choice Award and a Signal Silver Medal.

Episodes

May 6, 2024 28 mins

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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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Jameel Jaffer talks with Genevieve Lakier, professor of law at the University of Chicago Law School and one of the country’s leading theorists of free speech, about the climate for speech in the United States relating to the war in Israel and Gaza. How repressive is this moment, really? Is the First Amendment failing us? And what imprint will the events unfolding now leave on free speech law and culture?

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February 15, 2023 39 mins

Social media platforms have evaded heavy regulation on their content moderation practices so far, but the jig may very well be up. Many U.S. states are considering enacting laws to rein platforms in. To date, two states—Florida and Texas—have passed laws that significantly limit social media companies’ ability to moderate their platforms, and the measures look very likely to be up for Supreme Court review soon. Guests Alex Abdo—lit...

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February 8, 2023 37 mins

Social media platforms make more decisions about free speech every minute than the Supreme Court has made in more than two hundred years. So the values and systems adopted by these Corporate Speech Overlords matter a lot.  Guests Nicole Wong—former Google VP and Twitter Exec—and Alex Stamos—Director of the Stanford Internet Observatory and former Facebook Chief Security Officer—tell the story of how Big Tech stumbled its way throug...

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February 1, 2023 30 mins

Over time, the First Amendment has meant lots of different things to a lot of different people. In this episode, with University of Chicago law professor Genevieve Lakier by her side, host Evelyn Douek travels back to the time when modern free speech doctrine first started to emerge. Together they consider the values that have influenced how America thinks about free speech and how these values came to shape the way American law ap...

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January 25, 2023 33 mins

Thanks to the ruling in Knight v. Trump, then-president Trump could no longer block critics on social media. Hooray! But the ruling was only the start of the story, and quickly new questions arose. How would it affect other government officials? What might it mean for the development of the law more generally? Could the ruling be used in ways that the Knight Institute team didn't expect and doesn’t agree with? In this episode,...

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January 18, 2023 38 mins

What is Twitter (or any social media platform) as a matter of First Amendment law? In the first of five episodes, host Evelyn Douek begins to crack open this question, starting with perhaps the most famous Twitter handle of all — @realdonaldtrump. As president, Trump used his account to hire and fire government officials, butt heads with North Korea, and block his critics, a practice that one group of lawyers started to question.

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January 13, 2023 1 min

What is Twitter? Yes, it’s where you find the latest news and commentary, read about celebrities you love (or hate), and have a nice, civilized discussion with fellow users (read: sarcasm). But is it the public square? Nothing but a private platform? And what are social media platforms’ rights and obligations under First Amendment law? 

On Wednesday 1/18, the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University will lau...

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