NEW YORK—In a strong decision protecting the First Amendment rights of American human rights organizations and journalists, a federal magistrate judge yesterday rejected an attempt by a previously sanctioned Israeli settler to compel discovery from DAWN about their work documenting his role in human rights abuses in the West Bank.| Knight First Amendment Institute
Press freedom, already under threat from technological and economic disruptions and eroding public trust, has become even more vulnerable in President Trump’s second term. Lawsuits aimed at silencing critical journalism and punitive measures against press outlets perceived as anti-Trump are accompanied by a daily drumbeat of vitriol against the media from top public officials. On November 5, 2025, a panel of legal experts and journalists will consider how to protect the crucial role of th...| Knight First Amendment Institute
For well over a century, the border has been a legal black hole that enables the U.S. government to exclude non-citizens from entering the country—even for reasons that are discriminatory with respect to race, religion, or viewpoint. In 1892, the Supreme Court declared that, for non-citizens who have not been admitted to the United States, “the decisions of executive or administrative officers, acting within powers expressly conferred by Congress, are due process of law.”1. Nishimura Ek...| Knight First Amendment Institute
NEW YORK—In recent weeks, there have been multiple reports of law enforcement officers intimidating, arresting, and detaining members of the press who were documenting ICE activities and reporting on protests in solidarity with immigrants. The following can be attributed to Katy Glenn Bass, research director at the Knight First Amendment Institute. “Reports of ICE agents intimidating and arresting journalists at public protests are deeply alarming. The press is vital to the protection o...| Knight First Amendment Institute
On February 24, 2025, the Knight Institute filed a motion to intervene asking Judge Aileen Cannon, who presided over the now-abandoned prosecution of President Trump under the Espionage Act, to release Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report about Trump’s mishandling of classified information at Mar-a-Lago. The public has an extraordinary interest in the report, which concerns allegations of grave criminal conduct by the nation’s highest-ranking official. The report’s release would shed l...| Knight First Amendment Institute
ATLANTA—The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University today filed a petition asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit to compel a lower court to rule on a motion that the Institute filed more than six months ago, seeking the release of a Special Counsel report on President Trump’s alleged unlawful retention of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago after he left office in 2021. “The court’s months-long delay in ruling on our motion for the release of the S...| Knight First Amendment Institute
BOSTON—Judge William G. Young of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts today ruled that the Trump administration’s policy of arresting, detaining, and deporting noncitizen students and faculty members for their pro-Palestinian advocacy violates the First Amendment. The ruling comes after a two-week trial in the case brought by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, partnering with Sher Tremonte LLP, on behalf of the American Association of Univers...| Knight First Amendment Institute
NEW YORK—The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University announced today that Madhav Khosla, B.R. Ambedkar Professor of Indian Constitutional Law at Columbia Law School, will join the Institute as Senior Fellow for the next two years. Khosla’s work with the Institute will focus on the role of the legal profession in an era of rising authoritarianism. “We’ve long admired Professor Khosla’s work and are thrilled to have this opportunity to work with him on this urgent pr...| Knight First Amendment Institute
The fear that terrorist organizations will exploit the reach and affordances of social media platforms to spread propaganda, incite violence, and recruit followers was one of the first—and remains one of the most intense—anxieties about the harms caused by the internet. 1. Jillian C. York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism 100–113 (2021) (reviewing the pressure on tech companies to remove terrorist content from 2008 onwards). For years, both politic...| Knight First Amendment Institute
September 9, 2025| Knight First Amendment Institute
NEW YORK—Last night, hours after the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, threatened to take action against the ABC television network because of remarks made by Jimmy Kimmel on his late-night show, the network announced it was “indefinitely” suspending the program. In his opening monologue on Monday, Kimmel had commented on the murder of Charlie Kirk. The following can be attributed to Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute...| Knight First Amendment Institute
PHILADELPHIA—The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University today filed an amicus brief in Khalil v. Trump, urging the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit to find that the government’s detention and attempted deportation of Mahmoud Khalil on the basis of his protected speech is unconstitutional. The brief draws on the testimony of government officials during the recent trial in AAUP v. Rubio, a case brought by the Knight Institute challenging the Trump administration...| Knight First Amendment Institute
On September 17, 2025, the Knight Institute filed an amicus brief in Khalil v. Trump, a case challenging the Trump administration’s unlawful detention and attempted deportation of Mahmoud Khalil for his pro-Palestinian speech. The district court granted Mr. Khalil’s motion for a preliminary injunction, finding that Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s determination that Mr. Khalil was deportable under the foreign policy ground was likely unconstitutionally vague, and ordered Mr. Khalil’s ...| Knight First Amendment Institute
NEW YORK—President Trump late last night filed a lawsuit against The New York Times and Penguin Random House seeking $15 billion, alleging defamation and accusing the news outlet of being a “virtual mouthpiece” for the Democratic Party. The following can be attributed to Katie Fallow, deputy litigation director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. “Trump’s lawsuit against The New York Times and Penguin Random House is his latest attempt to weaponize defa...| Knight First Amendment Institute
LOS ANGELES — Free speech organizations filed a friend-of-the-court brief today in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in Newsom v. Trump, California’s lawsuit challenging President Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops and active-duty Marines earlier this summer in Los Angeles and surrounding counties. This brief comes less than one week after the district court judge in the case found that the military’s activities in L.A. violated the Posse Comitatus Act, which generally for...| Knight First Amendment Institute
I. Introduction| Knight First Amendment Institute
Abstract The rapid advancement and adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping power dynamics among key AI stakeholder groups. Capturing this shift requires a framework to assess various dimensions of power held by different players in the AI ecosystem. While previous work has explored AI power dynamics from theoretical and philosophical perspectives, little attention has been given to concretely measuring who is involved in and impacted by the shifting power dynamics, which dimensi...| Knight First Amendment Institute
One of my greatest failures—although I didn’t know it at the time—was at Columbia University. Claire Shipman, then co-chair of the Columbia board, had come across my book The Conflict over the Conflict: The Israel/Palestine Campus Debate, and in the fall of 2023 invited me to speak with the board, which was struggling with the issues the book addressed.1. Kenneth S. Stern, The Conflict over the Conflict: The Israel/Palestine Campus Debate (2020); As of the time of publication, Claire S...| Knight First Amendment Institute
August 29, 2025| Knight First Amendment Institute
Aryeh Neier was the national director of the ACLU in 1977 when American Nazis demanded the right to march through Skokie, Illinois—a town with a large population of Holocaust survivors. Neier was himself a Holocaust survivor and found the Nazis’ ideology repugnant, but the ACLU nonetheless took on the group’s case and argued, successfully, that the First Amendment required that they be permitted to march. The intensely controversial case cost the ACLU thousands of members but became emb...| Knight First Amendment Institute
WASHINGTON—According to news reports, a $2 million contract between the U.S. branch of the Israeli spyware vendor Paragon Solutions and the cyber division of U.S. Homeland Security Investigations was quietly reenabled over the weekend. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) signed a contract with the spyware maker last year, which had been under a stop work order pending review. The following can be attributed to Nadine Farid Johnson, policy director at the Knight First Amendment ...| Knight First Amendment Institute
We articulate a vision of artificial intelligence (AI) as normal technology. To view AI as normal is not to understate its impact—even transformative, general-purpose technologies such as electricity and the internet are “normal” in our conception. But it is in contrast to both utopian and dystopian visions of the future of AI which have a common tendency to treat it akin to a separate species, a highly autonomous, potentially superintelligent entity. 1. Nick Bostrom. 2012. The superint...| Knight First Amendment Institute
