The Spirit of Liberty

Uh well, welcome everybody. Thank you for coming out. I know it's been a interesting week with the snow and um the roads out there aren't so great. So, uh very much appreciate uh you joining us this evening. Um I want to start um as of course we do um with a land acknowledgement. Um, I begin by acknowledging that Delhauszy University operates in the unseated territories of the Mikmma, the Wistquay, and the Bescotum Mukati peoples. These sovereign nations hold inherent rights as the original peoples of these lands, and we each carry collective obligations under the Peace and Friendship Treaties. Section 35 of the Constitution Act 1982 also recognizes and affirms Aboriginal and treaty rights in Canada. We also recognize here that African Nova Scotians are a distinct people whose histories, legacies, and contributions have enriched that part of MCMagi known as Nova Scotia for over 400 years. So, um again, welcome. Um and uh I'm very delighted to uh welcome uh Jamil Jaffer here this evening. Um I'm going to start by uh saying a little bit about uh uh Ro uh Horus Reed is a the dean after whom this lecture is named. I also want to um uh welcome uh his son uh Dr. Robert Reid who is with us every year for this lecture and it's always a delight um uh to have him join us. So we have many lectures here at the law school. This is the oldest. This is the one that has been established um uh and hung around the longest. Um it was established in honor of the memory of Horus V. Reed who was the dean of this law school from 1950 to 1964. That is 14 years. I am not lasting that long. I will just tell you that right now. Uh I am not lasting 14 years. Good on Horus Reed for doing that. Um the lecture series was established as a joint project of both the Reed family and the law school. Um so um Horus Reid had a rich academic life. He was also committed deeply committed to public service. He enlisted during the first world war. He served as the chair of regulations revision committee with the Royal Canadian Navy during the second world war. He served as a longtime me member of the Nova Scotia Labor Relations Board as a member of the conference of governing bodies of the legal profession and the conference of commissions on the uniform uniformity of legislation. Uh so he was a very committed uh um lawyer to the well-being of both this law school and the profession. Um, not only though is he recognized for his remarkable life of public service, he is also remembered fondly and with great respect for his scholarly achievements and his contributions as a teacher and dean of this law school. In an editorial in the Halifax Herald in 1975, his life as a scholar was described in really quite touching terms. So I am going to read them. Horus Emerson Reed uh former dean of Delhausely Law School and a legal scholar and law teacher taught law with all of the authority of profound and mature scholar of international renown. But he also brought to his teaching the benevolence and h humanity which were among his most admirable qualities. Kindly and affable, readily available to students and colleagues alike, he presided as dean over a lengthy period of unparalleled expansion and development in the faculty of law. So this lecture is very uh series is established uh in honor of his um remarkable contributions and achievements. Um it's also worth noting that Horus Reed had a crossborder academic and teaching career um starting out in Minnesota of all the places. Um and I mentioned that both because um our speaker this evening also has that crossber um uh involvement um and then I do too. So I very much sort of uh appreciate and understand the sort of movement across borders um and the legal uh traditions we share which are of course very much under attack these days. Um so this year uh for this lecture we are very delighted to have Jaffer with us uh to deliver the 44th annual Horus Eye Reed Memorial Lecture. Uh J is the executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and under his leadership, the institute has filed precedent setting litigation, undertaken major interdisciplinary research initiatives and become an influential voice in debates about the freedom of speech and the press in the digital age. Until 2016, Jamil served as deputy legal director at the ACLU where he oversaw the organiz organization's work on free speech, privacy, technology, national security, and international human rights. He has a long list of litigation successes uh working with the ACLU u such that the New York Times described one of his transparency cases as among the most successful in the history of public disclosure. Jamil's writing has appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, and foreign affairs. And he has delivered a slew of addresses and important lectures, including here in Canada at Osgood Hall Law School, the Royal Ontario Museum, uh, and then also in the US, of course, including at Harvard's Kennedy School, Shaenstein Center. He was named to foreign uh, policies top 100 global thinkers list in 2012. He received the Vox Libera award from Canadian journalists for free expression in 2015 and was inducted into the museum's uh freedom of information hall of fame in 2016. Jamil is a graduate of Williams College, Cambridge University and Harvard Law School where he was editor of the Harvard Law Review. He served as a law clerk to the honorable Amalia Kirst of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and then to uh the right honorable Beverly McLaclin, chief justice of the Supreme Court of Canada. In recent years, he has served on the board of the Pierre Elliot Trudeau Foundation, the advisory board uh of First Look Medius Press Freedom Litigation Fund and the advisory board for the Center for Democracy and Technology. um as we watch um uh the unimaginable repression uh really truly beyond my imagination before I saw it. Uh as we watch this unimaginable uh repression of basic human rights and liberties unfold in the US and as we worry about what that means for people living in the US, what that means for us just [snorts] on the other side of the border, what that means for human rights everywhere. J's theme for this evening, the spirit of liberty, could not be more important or more pressing. It is timely. It is essential. Um, and I'm looking forward to hearing uh and uh all of the wisdom that uh J has to share on this. So, um with that, J. Oh, >> uh just uh if you have your cell phones, could you put them on um silent? >> I should have mentioned that. Um CBC is recording. So if you can ensure that your yes phones are silent that would be great. And um again Jal [applause] >> thank you Dean Harding and thanks to all of you who were involved in organizing this event especially to Elizabeth and Mary and to everybody from the CBC. And thanks also to all of you for braving the cold and the snow to be here this evening. Um, Mr. Reid, it's an honor to have the chance to deliver this lecture in memory of your father. As Dean Harding mentioned, I grew up in Canada, but I've been working in the United States now for 25 years, mostly litigating civil liberties and human rights cases in American courts. Because of the work that I do, I know very well that American democracy is deeply flawed and that the Constitution's promises, which were unevenly distributed to begin with, aren't always kept. Still, the United States precipitous descent into illiberalism over the past year has been astonishing to me, as I'm sure it has been to many of you as well. A cult of personality has formed around President Trump, whose administration is nivist, corrupt, belligerent, and cruel. The president threatens war against America's closest allies and talks entirely of martial law at home. The immigration agency, ICE, has been unleashed against non-citizens and citizens alike. And fear has taken hold basically everywhere in newsrooms, in universities, schools, cultural institutions, and immigrant communities across the country. American democracy suddenly seems at real risk of being extinguished altogether. We all know that the United States wouldn't be the first democracy to fade or to flicker out. But even accounting for its defects, the United States is not just any democracy. It has a celebrated constitution that divides power between three co-equal branches of government. The Constitution's First Amendment gives robust protection to the expressive rights that leaders with authoritarian impulses often try to stifle, including the freedoms of inquiry, speech, assembly, and the press. The US is also home to the world's most influential media organizations and to many of the world's most respected universities. It has a formidable legal bar, a nearly 250 year history of judicial independence, a deeply rooted tradition of protest, political activism, and civil disobedience, and countless civil society groups dedicated to the defense of constitutional liberties. How is it that authoritarianism has taken hold in this environment and taken hold so quickly? The title of this lecture, the spirit of liberty, is taken from the title of a speech that the American judge learned hand delivered in May 1944 as Allied forces were readying themselves in Britain for the invasion of occupied France. Addressing an audience of more than a million people gathered in Central Park, Judge Hand wondered whether Americans had come to place too much faith in lawyers and in legal institutions. This is what he said. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women. When it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there, it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it. I've been thinking a lot about Judge Han's observation as the leaders of so many of the United States most storied civic institutions, law firms, news organizations, universities have chosen to accommodate rather than resist President Trump's illiberal agenda. By many measures, the United States democratic institutions are the strongest in the world. It turns out this isn't enough. So, let's start with this. Anyone who thought President Trump's second term would be like his first term was very wrong. During his first term, Trump targeted minorities, immigrants, the press. He sometimes won the support of the courts, but his most ambitious attacks on democratic freedoms and democratic institutions sputtered. The Supreme Court rejected his attempt to add a citizenship question to the census. Whistleblowers complicated his effort to strongarm Ukraine into investigating former President Biden. Some of the people he appointed to leadership positions in the military and the intelligence agencies slowwalked or even simply refused to implement his most extreme policies. Many of them left his administration and became vocal critics of it. Trump's effort to overturn the results of the 26 2020 presidential election was ultimately a failure too. Traumatic as it was for the country, he was impeached for it, his second impeachment, with the House of Representatives having already impeached him 13 months earlier for obstruction and abuse of power. But Trump and his advisers drew lessons from that experience, even if they weren't the ones we might have wanted them to draw. In the first year of his second term, Trump issued more than 200 executive orders reshaping government policy on issues including immigration, energy, artificial intelligence, anti-semitism, transgender athletes in sport, diversity, equity, and inclusion, and free speech. He installed loyalists to lead the most important federal agencies and they in turn purged the AY's top ranks of anyone whose devotion to the president couldn't be conclusively established. With D with descent all but eliminated within the executive branch, Trump turned to the elimination of dissent outside of it. sometimes through direct censorship, but more often through intimidation and threats. Threats of fines, sanctions, investigations, and even prosecutions. Attorney General Pam Bondi, who was previously Trump's personal lawyer, has indicted some of Trump's political enemies, including James Comey, the former FBI director, and Leticia James, New York's former attorney general, on charges that are transparently pretextual. Trump has threatened the indictment of many more, including Jerome Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Tim Waltz, the governor of Minnesota, and Jack Smith, the former special counsel, who indicted Trump for trying to overturn the 2020 election. Even more consequentially, Trump has mounted a sustained and multi-dimensional attack on the institutions that could in theory serve as checks on his power. Soon after taking office, he imposed sanctions on elite law firms in retaliation for their representation of clients whom Trump viewed as political enemies. He suspended their security clearances, terminated their government contracts, and barred them from federal buildings. He threatened to impose sanctions on other firms if they didn't agree to take on conservative clients, provide tens of millions of dollars in pro proono representation to causes that he endorsed, and abandon hiring programs meant to address past discrimination. His campaign against the media has been, if anything, even more far-reaching. One early move was expelling the Associated Press from the White House press pool for its refusal to call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. The message to other news organizations was clear. If you want to keep your access, you need to describe the world in our terms. For the past 6 months, reporters have been denied access to the Pentagon unless they pledge not to report government secrets. Just pause for a moment to consider what journalism would look like if journalists agreed to that demand. Famously thin- skinned, Trump demand that CBS cancel Steven Colbear's show and that ABC cancel Jimmy Kimmel's. The Federal Communications Commission, now led by a Trump loyalist, has told broadcasters that it will pull their licenses and block their mergers if they can't bring themselves to be more sympathetic to the president's agenda. Just a couple of weeks ago, the FBI raided the home of a Washington Post journalist. It seized her phones and laptops in connection with an investigation into a national security leak that embarrassed the president and the secretary of state. This was the first time in modern American history that the FBI has searched the home of a journalist who wasn't herself accused of a crime. And it was a major escalation in Trump's campaign against the press. a warning not just to journalists but to their sources as well. The institute that I direct, the the Knight Institute, is housed at Colombia University. And so I've seen the Trump administration's assault on higher education up close. citing universities diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and their purported indifference to anti-semitism on campus. The administration froze or canceled billions of dollars in research grants. It threatened universities accreditation and charitable status. It launched dozens of civil rights investigations and then demanded far-reaching and sometimes outlandish concessions that had no relation at all to the civil rights violations that purportedly motivated the investigations. Using federal funding as leverage, Trump demanded that universities suppress lawful protest, limit admissions of foreign students, stop issuing institutional statements about matters of public concern, shut down offices meant to support marginalized groups, and restrict the teaching of race and gender. The Trump administration is right now demanding that universities sign a so-called compact that would require them to abolish academic departments that quote belittle conservative ideas. One especially noxious part of Trump's assault on universities has been a ruthless crackdown on foreign students who participated in campus protests relating to the war in Gaza. Fulfilling a promise he'd made to campaign donors, Trump directed the departments of state and homeland security to arrest and deport those students on the ground that their political advocacy undermined US foreign policy interests. ICE agents arrested Mahmud Khalil, a Colombia grad student and green card holder, a legal permanent resident who at one time had served as an intermediary between protesters and the university. Later they arrested Mosen Madawi, a Colombia undergraduate when he appeared for a scheduled naturalization interview in Vermont. Another student, Romesha Osurk, a grad student at Tus University, was arrested in Somerville, Massachusetts, because she'd co-written an op-ed calling on her university to engage with students, demanding that the university divest from Israel. You may have seen a video of her arrest which shows masked agents appearing out of nowhere and surrounding her on the sidewalk as she screams in terror, apparently confused about the identity and authority of the men forcing handcuffs around her wrists and pushing her into an unmarked car. Over the course of a few weeks, the administration arrested and imprisoned a dozen students and sumearily revoked the visas of hundreds of others. As with the campa campaigns against the law firms and the press, the point of this crackdown on foreign students was to intimidate and silence. And the strategy was at least partly successful. Judge William Young is an 85year-old jurist who was nominated to the federal bench in Boston by President Reagan more than four decades ago. For the past nine months, he's been presiding over a case in which the American Association of University Professors, the AAUP, and the Middle East Studies Association, MESA, are challenging the constitutionality of the crackdown on student protesters. My institute has represented the AUP and MESA in this case from the beginning, and we continue to represent them now. At a trial over the summer, we presented testimony that foreign students and faculty had withdrawn from political activism out of concern that their expression or associations would result in arrest, detention, or deportation. Professors with green cards testified of being terrified that attending a protest, signing an open letter, or even publishing scholarship about Israel and Palestine would result in the upending of their professional and personal lives. The leaders of AUP and Mesa explained to the court that the arrest had created a climate of fear and repression on campuses around the country. In a blistering 166page ruling issued after the trial, Judge Young held that the Trump administration's policy of targeting the students violated the First Amendment. He characterized the government's campaign against the students as a quote scandalous effort to silence constitutionally protected descent. It struck me that that phrase, a scandalous effort to silence constitutionally protected descent, provides a fitting description of much of what the Trump administration has been doing over the past year. So, this isn't the first time the United States has been down this road. Between 1917 and 1920, the US government prosecuted more than 2,000 anti-war activists under the Espionage and Sedition Acts, and it deported hundreds of foreign citizens thought to be communists or anarchists. The first amendment as we know it today emerged during that period. The first red scare in response to the realization that democracy wouldn't survive if courts didn't extend broad constitutional protection to political expression and association. Judge Hand wrote one of the most important early first amendment decisions. He wrote it in 1917, 27 years before he spoke about the spirit of liberty in Central Park. The case involved a challenge to the postmasters's refusal to carry a magazine called The Masses, which contained articles and political cartoons opposing the war. The postmaster argued that the magazine violated the Espionage Act, but Hand interpreted the act narrowly because he concluded that interpreting it broadly would have dire implications for free speech. Han was only a lower court judge at the time, but his reasoning was influential, including with the Supreme Court justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Lewis Brandeise. Beginning in 1918, Holmes and Brandeise wrote a series of dissents and concurrences that cast the First Amendment as the nation's preeminent guarantor of the principle that the people are sovereign over the government and not the government over the people. Over time, this conception of the first amendment came to be embraced by the whole court. Today, first amendment doctrine provides powerful defenses against censorship for those willing to use them. For example, it prohibits the government from censoring the press, whether by prior restraint or criminal prosecution. It bars the government from punishing people because of their political viewpoints from arresting them or imprisoning them or investigating them or subjecting them to financial or other sanctions. It also limits the government's power to use the denial of funding as a mechanism for silencing disscent. Of course, most other democracies, including this one, extend [snorts] constitutional protection to free speech, too. But no society on the planet gives free speech as broad a scope as the United States does. And no society protects it as categorically. It's precisely because free speech is so well protected in the United States, so well fortified by the Constitution, laws, and the courts. It's because free speech is so well fortified in the United States that it's been so dispiriting to watch the leaders of the most powerful American institutions wither and shrivel in response to Trump's threats rather than assert their first amendment right sorry rather than assert their first amendment rights in court a task that literally no one was better situated to do some of the most sophisticated and wellresourced law firms in the country simply agreed to Trump's demands. They let Trump tell them who they could hire, who they could represent, and to whom they could provide their services. Pro proono. The leaders of some of the country's most respected universities, including Colombia, I'm sorry to say, entered into analogous settlements, agreeing to curtail academic freedom, admit fewer students from abroad, shut down diversity offices, and suppress student protests. Some law firms and universities have sued and I'll come back to that. But it's important to understand that those cases have not been the norm. Resistance has been exceptional. Surrender has been the rule. I still find it astounding to take one example that no American university filed suit to challenge the arrest and threaten deportation of their students for their peaceful advocacy against the war in Gaza. That advocacy was controversial in some quarters, but not even the Trump administration contended that it was illegal. So why didn't the universities go to court? Even setting aside the university's obligations to their students, surely it should have been obvious to university leaders that their institutions can't survive long if the government can summarily imprison and deport students for speech that's protected by the Constitution. To their credit, the AUP in Mesa filed the case that universities didn't. But it will be a permanent stain on American higher education that universities mainly left it to others to defend their students and to champion the freedoms that are essential to the university's own survival. I wish it were otherwise, but capitulation has been the rule for media and technology companies as well. Even before Trump returned to the Oval Office, technology moguls including Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Zuck Zuckerberg, and Sam Alman made huge donations to Trump's inaugural fund in the hope of ingratiating themselves with the incoming president. In the days leading up to the election, the billionaire owners of the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, Bezos and Patrick Sunong, both vetoed vetoed editorials that would have endorsed Kamala Harris, not because they disagreed with the editorials, but because they concluded that crossing Trump was just too risky. Media and social media companies also paid obscene amounts of money to Trump to settle feeble lawsuits that he'd filed against them during the presidential campaign. Trump claimed that ABC News star anchor George Stephanopoulos had defamed him by saying on TV that a jury had found him liable for rape when in fact it had found him liable for sexual assault. Among First Amendment litigators, there was near universal agreement that ABC would have won the case if it had defended itself in court. But ABC didn't want to be adverse to the president, so it paid him $15 million to end the suit. CBS paid Trump $16 million to settle a lawsuit in which he complained about innocuous edits that the network had made to an interview with Kamala Harris. Meta paid Trump $25 million to settle an equally frivolous lawsuit over Meta's decision to suspend Trump's account after the events of January 6, 2021. All of these companies had the law on their side, but they folded. And once they folded, others folded, too, entering into their own settlements with the Trump administration or changing their practices preemptively in the hope that doing so would keep them out of the administration's crosshairs. It's sometimes said that courage can be contagious, but it turns out that cowardice can be contagious, too. Even today, the leaders of many of America's most important institutions often seem to be engaged in a desperate, panicked effort to anticipate Trump's next fixation and to conform to Trump's preferences before Trump feels it necessary to state them. Here's the social media company adjusting its content moderation policies to accommodate white nationalists. Here's the National Portrait Gallery removing a biography of President Trump because it says accurately that he was twice impeached. Here's a technology company deleting an entirely lawful app from its app store because ICE has raised concerns. And here's CBS News nixing a story about the Trump administration deporting Venezuelans to a notorious prison in El Salvador because Steven Miller, the president's adviser, has declined to be quoted in the story. Just a few weeks before he returned to the Oval Office at the beginning of last year, Trump told a reporter, quote, "In the first term, everyone was fighting me, but in this term, everyone wants to be my friend." Now, that's not entirely right, but it's not entirely wrong either. At least among the leaders of America's elite civic institutions, no one wants to cross Trump. Fear is the spirit of the Times. I mentioned earlier that the FBI recently raided the home of a Washington Post reporter and seized her laptops and phones, a serious escalation of Trump's effort to intimidate news organizations that report critically about his policies. Press freedom groups condemned the raid, but Bezos, the Post owner, made no public statement at all. To my knowledge, he still hasn't made one. So perhaps it's oversimplifying things to say that American elites have failed to defend their institutions and to defend the freedoms that are important to their institutions survival. After all, all of the options presented to these leaders were bad. They had to make difficult choices under immense pressure. Surely they just made the decisions they thought would serve their institutions best, which is what it was their jobs to do. Let's consider more carefully in the time we have left why so many institutional leaders settled with Trump and whether their decisions did in fact serve their institutions well. First, some leaders settled with Trump because they doubted they could win in court. They concluded that some of Trump's threats were too vague to be legally actionable, that some injuries were too diffuse, and that some injuries just weren't susceptible to judicial remedy. They also doubted that district court judges would be willing to side with them against senior government officials whose motives the courts are often unwilling to question. Over time though, it's become increasingly clear that the courts, the lower courts at least, are ready to play their constitutionally assigned role. The law firms that sued when Trump revoked their security clearances and barred them from federal buildings, all of them won quick victories. Many universities settled, but Harvard sued over Trump's freezing uh of federal grants, and it won. A slew of media organizations have reached settlements with Trump. But the New York Times defended itself when Trump sued the paper over its reporting about his tax filings, and it won too with the judge even ordering Trump to pay its legal fees. The record of the past year strongly suggests that the institutional leaders who settled did so precipitously and unnecessarily. Second, some leaders believe they would win in court. They would win. it could win in court, but concluded that winning in court wouldn't be enough. Their reasoning went like this. The federal government can punish a media organization in many different ways. It can deny reporters access to government officials or facilities, expel them from the White House press pool, search their journalist homes, threaten their their broadcast licenses, investigate them for publishing national security secrets, and refuse to approve proposed mergers. Universities are similarly exposed. The government can freeze their funding, but it can also refuse them new grants. It can threaten their accreditation, deny visas to their foreign students, in and investigate them for supposed violations of anti-discrimination law. What good does it do to win a court order against one coercive action when the government has so many other coercive possibilities available to it? That reasoning led many institutional leaders to conclude that settlement was the better course. What this line of thinking overlooked is that settlements with Trump turn out not to be worth the paper they're printed on. He just doesn't honor them. To the contrary, he views any concession as a sign of weakness and as an indication that there's more value to be extracted. And so universities that expected that their settlements would end their conflict with the administration have been subjected to continuing pressure campaigns. The same has been true of the news organizations that paid Trump millions of dollars to withdraw his frivolous lawsuits. Meanwhile, the cost to the institutions that settled, not to mention the cost to our democracy, have been profound, even if they've been difficult to measure. CBS was once the most respected news organization in America, thanks, ironically, to its fearless coverage of McCarthyism. Now, it's a punchline on the late night ta talk shows. The law firms that capitulated to Trump have lost not only their credibility as advocates, but also some of their clients, partners, and associates. The leaders of these institutions were absolutely right to conclude that litigation would be risky and costly and insufficient. But we know now that litigation for all of its drawbacks was preferable to the alternative. Third, some institutions settled with Trump because they were sympathetic to his administration's agenda or to parts of it. Some university leaders were sympathetic to the Trump administration's criticisms of affirmative action and DEI, and they shared the view that elite universities had become hostile to conservative viewpoints and to white men. Some university trustees and alumni thought the arrests of foreign students who had participated in pro Palestinian protests were not justified, but overdue. Some trustees, administrators, faculty, and advocacy groups saw in the Trump administration's hostility to higher education an opportunity to institute changes that they themselves have been advocating for many years. I said earlier that universities had capitulated to the Trump administration, but in some cases the dynamic was more collaboration than capitulation. I think we've already seen that this strategy was shortsighted, too. The Trump administration has seized on concerns relating to anti-semitism and DEI to justify a much broader and still expanding attack on higher education. Judge Allison Burroughs, who presided over the case in which Harvard successfully challenged the cancellation of its grants, wrote that the Trump administration has used anti-semitism as a smokeokc screen. That assessment seems exactly right to me. The Trump administration is similarly using free speech as a smoke a smoke screen for all sorts of censorship. For example, in the name of free speech, it's revoking the visas of researchers who study misinformation. In the name of free speech, it's investigating news organizations for their exercise of editorial judgment. And in the name of free speech, it's demanding that universities, as I said earlier, abolish departments that belittle conservative ideas. So those who've tried to make common cause with the administration on issues relating to equality and free speech have been used. Finally, some institutional leaders thought it would just be better if some other institution did the fighting. This is always the dynamic with bullies. Of course, there's always the hope that if one keeps one's head down, the bully will focus his attention on someone else. And there's always the hope that someone else will do the difficult work of putting the bully in his place. Courage is a public good, and so it's under supplied. In describing the atmosphere in the United States in the years immediately after the Second World War, Norman Mailor wrote that quote a stench of fear had come out of every pore of American life. That the nation was suffering from quote a collective failure of nerve. He lamented that the only courage with rare exceptions that we've been witnessed to has been the isolated courage of isolated people. The landscape in the United States now is similar and for similar reasons. Most of the leaders of the United States elite universities, news organizations, law firms, and cultural institutions, they understand very well that Trump poses an extraordinary threat to the democratic freedoms and values that are essential to their own uni their own institutions thriving and indeed survival. But there's a collective failure of nerve. The leaders of the United States elite institutions haven't been willing to use the tools that the Constitution, the laws, and the courts afford them. They seem also to lack the political structures and human relationships that would allow them to organize a coordinated collective response to the threat that Trump poses. Judge Han delivered his spirit of liberty speech on May 21st, which at that time was known as I am an American day. It was a naturalization ceremony, a celebration of immigrants and of all they contribute to American life. The kind of celebration that Mosen Madawi, the Colombia undergraduate, might have attended had he not been arrested when he arrived for his naturalization interview. The speech is about courage. Han celebrates immigrants who had quote the courage to break from the past and brave the dangers and the loneliness of a strange land. He wonders quote what was the object that nerved us or that or or those that went before us to this choice. And then when he asked them to pledge their faith in the glorious destiny of our beloved country, he tells them that the America of their aspirations will never come into being except quote as the conscious and courage conscience and courage of Americans create it. So to hand leaving one's home requires courage, but creating the nation of one's aspirations and defending it, those tasks require courage too. He pays tribute to the quote young men who are at this moment fighting and dying for an America that has not yet come into being. The spirit of liberty is still easy to find in the United States, but you have to look beyond the leadership of elite institutions. Among ordinary citizens, there's no scarcity of civic courage. The No Kings Day rallies over the summer drew around 5 million Americans to demonstrations in 2,000 cities and towns across the country. Thousands of Americans protested President Trump's deployment of the National Guard in Portland, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington. Government lawyers have resigned rather than participate in corrupt investigations and prosecutions. You've all seen the footage of Americans around the country trying to protect their im immigrant neighbors from ICE. Even as ICE raids have become increasingly violent and Vice President Vance has assured ICE agents falsely that they enjoy absolute immunity for actions taken in connection with their duties. The tens of thousands of American students who participated in peaceful demonstrations and encampments meant to assert the humanity of Palestinians. Those students also exhibited an admirable civic fortitude, a willingness to pay a personal price for the defense of human rights. One of the people who testified in the case that I mentioned earlier, the case in which the AUP and Mesa are challenged in the arrest of student protesters is a guy called Bernard Nickel. He came to the United States as a student from Germany three decades earlier and then stayed on to teach philosophy first at TUS and then at Harvard. When the trial began, he'd just completed a three-year term as chair of Harvard's philosophy department. Professor Nickel is a green card holder, not a US citizen. But until very recently, he felt that he and his family were secure in the United States, and he didn't hesitate to speak out publicly on controversial political issues. He assumed that the First Amendment protected him. The arrests of foreign students in the spring of 2024 made him suddenly aware of his own vulnerability. Watching the video of masked ICE agents arresting Rumata Osurk, the tough student, was a particular shock. He testified at trial that he decided when he saw that video that he would quote, "Keep my head down completely. I would not go to protest. I would not write. I would not sign on to public letters and any other po potential forms of publicity I would just avoid." During a hostile cross-examination, a government lawyer asked Professor Nickel why if he was really so afraid of government retaliation. Why did he agree to testify in a case in which ICE was a defendant? If he'd resolved not to sign on to public letters and engage in public advocacy, why was he here in court testifying against the government? This is what Professor Nichols said in response. You know, anybody can sign on to an open letter. anybody can go to a protest. My sense was that in this trial, somebody in my specific situation, somebody who is a senior scholar with a secure position at Harvard, I don't know that there are many people who could have done this. So, I thought this is something that's worth it. This is where I live and I want this to be a country and a nation of laws, not men. I believe in these kinds of processes and procedures. So, this is me doing my part. Other faculty from universities around the country offered similar testimony. They were fearful that their participation in the lawsuit would provoke government retaliation, but they participated nonetheless out of a sense of obligation to their American families and friends, their students, and to the democracy they had made their own. They did their part. If the United States is going to return from the brink of this abyss, it will be because ordinary people, citizens and non-citizens alike, still care deeply about their democracy, even if so many elites have shown themselves unprepared to defend it. Americans reclaim their democracy after the first Red Scare and again after the second. Perhaps we'll reclaim it again after this one. But learn at hand was surely right about this. It will take more than constitutions, laws, and courts. It will take courage, too. Thanks again to all of you for being here tonight. [applause] Well, that was excellent. Um, we've just been listening to uh Jaffer give the 2026 uh Reed lecture at Dhousy's Shoulick Lav School of Law. Uh, a couple questions. I'm going to get you to get a little bit closer to the mic and then I'm going to ask for anybody who wants to ask questions and potentially get on uh ideas and become famous, I don't know, and wealthy just like like us all. Um Jal, I'm just sort of curious. Do you get a sense at all, you work at Colombia, um that there's a regret by the the leadership? I know the leadership's changed, but but by that they made concessions to the Trump administration. I I'm not sure I want to talk about Colombia's leadership specifically. Um but I am in a lot of conversations with leaders of institutions like Colombia, not just universities but media organizations and to some extent law firms too. Um and yes, my sense is that at least some of these leaders see now that um the settlements have not achieved what they had hoped they would achieve. Uh it's hard to deny that. I think um um I really do think I tried to emphasize this in my talk too, but I really do think that these uh leaders were in a really difficult position that these were hard choices. All the options were bad and easy for me to sit here criticizing them. I understand all of that. Um and and yet I feel like uh you know they've made the wrong decisions. Um and that our democracy has paid a significant price for um the leaders of these institutions failure to stand up for their institutions and for the freedoms that their institutions rely on. But >> can you talk to me then about the chill? Do you see in discourse among students uh public discourse that there is a chill still? >> Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I mean I think that um students are terrified of especially foreign students are terrified of um speaking out on any controversial political issue. you know, it started with Israel Palestine, but has, you know, predictably not stopped there. Um, you know, after the Trump administration said, "We're going to deport uh foreign citizens who participate in pro Palestinian advocacy," they said, "Well, we're going to deport foreign citizens who have hostile attitudes towards the United States," a phrase that they haven't, you know, defined. After that, they canled the visas of people who criticized uh Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist who was um tragically murdered uh in Utah last year. Uh and more recently, they've canceled the visas of foreign citizens who are uh studying misinformation, disinformation. So, you know, if you're >> studying misinformation there >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is uh uh Christmas Eve. The Trump administration announced that uh it would cancel the visas and deny entry to foreign citizens who study disinformation or misinformation, who work on content uh moderation. They see all of these activities as censorship. Um you know, they they it it's almost, you know, it's just an upside down uh understanding of the world. But um you know they're trying to deport uh one person already from inside the somebody actually not deport they've canled the green card of somebody inside the United States for his um uh work on misinformation and disinformation and they have uh identified four foreign uh citizens outside the United States whose visas they will not uh recognize or who whose visa as they've canceled for their involvement in these activities. So um you know it started narrowly focused on these students who participated in pro Palestinian advocacy but but you know now the the attack is much broader. >> You've argued before the Supreme Court uh in the states the Supreme Court feels well not feels it's the justice system feels more and more and is more and more politicized. uh the current Supreme Court which is heavily on the conservative side in terms of judges and appointments have um given President Trump incredible extraordinary powers >> that have been and they've been criticized for that by some. Do you think that well I I maybe I'll ask you how much confidence do you have these days in the Supreme Court not only in their judgment judgments but to uphold uh democracy? >> Yeah. I mean I I have been disappointed with many of the Supreme Court's rulings over the last year. I think the Supreme Court had opportunities to draw lines and it should have drawn lines and it didn't. Um, now that said, the Supreme Court um is um often very responsive to public opinion and if the Supreme Court sees that the Trump administration doesn't have public support, it's conceivable that the Supreme Court will be more willing to uh use its own political capital um its own institutional capital uh you know to draw those lines. Um but it's a real question. Is the Supreme Court going to um you know fulfill its constitutional obligations? And even if it does, what will the Trump administration do in response? Because you know, with with lower court uh decisions, the Trump administration has already, you know, complied with those decisions very unevenly. There are, you know, some decisions that it seems to be um uh you know, ignoring all all al all together. uh if the Supreme Court rules against the Trump administration, then you know we'll be confronted with this question of you will the Trump administration honor those those rulings or not. >> Are you surprised though that they gave these additional powers to Trump? I mean it's quite extraordinary in the amount of powers they have. Are you surprised that some of the legal minds there even if they are appointed by conservative presidents that they would have given him so much power because >> well I mean I think that some some of this is a kind of intellectual inertia in in the sense that or or um you know this development of the theory of the the unitary executive um that predates Trump you know all the way back to, you know, 9/11 at least. Um, the Supreme Court has been, uh, there's been a conservative movement to invest the presidency with, you know, more more power. And, you know, that that movement again predated Trump and has sort of continued after Trump, you know, took took office. Now we're seeing some of the implications of um centering all of this power in the not just the executive branch but the presidency in particular. And um you know a lot of us look at that look at this and and and our reaction is well you know this is precisely the reason we said 15 years ago it was a mistake to um you know put all of this this power in the executive branch and in the president in particular whether the Supreme Court sees it that way I don't know you know we'll >> can it be reversed I mean this is I'm not a lawyer so here I am asking >> yeah I mean in in um yes in in in theory the Supreme Court could could walk it back. Uh it's seems unlikely to me that this Supreme Court with the makeup it has right now is going to walk back um decisions relating to executive power. >> And plus, I can't imagine any president wanting them to to walk back anyways. I mean I don't know about that but >> yeah I mean it it's um you know there there there are cases now that you know even the case that I spent a lot of time talking about the the the one that AUP and Mesa filed filed you cases like that raise questions about um presidential power because here the president is arguing that um his power over foreign policy gives him the authority to um expel all non-citizens from the country on the basis of their political viewpoints or deny visas to people from outside the country on the basis of their political viewpoints. But it's all based on this theory of uh the president's uh exclusive or new ex or near exclusive powers over foreign policy. Right? So it's an executive power case in that sense. It's a it's a it's a case about um whether there are limits to the president's foreign policy, foreign affairs power. Um, and there are lots of other cases that are making their way up to the Supreme Court that are in one way or another cases about executive power. So, it's it's possible that the Supreme Court will say in some of those cases that, you know what, uh, the president has a lot of power, but not that power. You know, it's possible the Supreme Court will draw those lines. And we obviously hope that the Supreme Court will draw that line in this case brought by AUP and Mesa, but um the Supreme Court hasn't been drawing those lines over the last, you know, couple of decades. >> It's been 3 days. Um we this lecture is happening at the end of January and we're uh January of 2026, 3 days since um the second American citizen was killed uh on the streets of Minneapolis by uh federal agents ICE. What's your reflection on that? And where is America heading, do you think? Is this perhaps something that's going to turn the tide in terms of they're talking about on the local and the state level that there will be prosecution, but what's what what what are your thoughts these days in in light of what's happened three days ago and and recently before that? Well, I mean, I I thought that the, you know, I watched the a lot of the footage from Minneapolis and found it um, you know, harrowing and um almost unbelievable that this was taking place in in an American city. Um I I guess it has been uh somewhat encouraging that um there has been some push back uh on these policies not just from Democrats but from um a few Republicans as as as well. you know, the Trump administration seems to be um uh on the back foot in Minneapolis now. I guess that's, you know, a good thing if they reign in ICE in in Minneapolis, but I I think it's too early to say that they're, you know, ready to give up on this entire I don't think they're ready to give up on the uh broader policy. And my my guess is that, you know, they're going to deploy ICE in the same way in other American cities. Um, you know, there was a lower court in Minneapolis that, um, drew some lines around ISIS activities in Minneapolis. um uh you know ba basically uh to protect civil liberties to protect the rights of people who are filming um you know monitoring what ICE is doing. So it was a good decision from a district court in Minneapolis but it was stayed by an appellet an appellet court. U I think a lot is going to turn on what the appellet courts do in these kinds of cases. Um, I know that if ICE is deployed in other cities in New York, for example, you know, New York will go to court and try to get uh the courts to impose limits on ISIS's um operations in the city. A lot is going to turn on what the appellet courts do uh with those cases. >> When you were talking before, and this is my last question before I ask people to give questions and talking about judge uh hand, sorry. Yeah. In judge hand off the top at at its heart at the core of democracy is it the people themselves and their actions as opposed to any institution political party the law the judicial system is that what's going to make a change and if it if so how does that come about? Yeah. Um I mean the mo the most important thing is that people go and vote, right? And uh we will have midterm elections in the United States uh later this year and um it's conceivable that the political landscape will change pretty dramatically uh after those midterm elections. Um, one question is whether those elections are going to be free and fair. And um, one of the reasons we we we spend so much or or you know my my institute focuses on the first amendment. One of the reasons we think of the first amendment is is especially important is that it protects the process of democracy. The first amendment is the process of democracy. Right? you um th this is Han's theory of the first amendment. It's the theory that you know the Supreme Court in the United States has adopted that the the main point of the first amendment is to ensure that we can govern ourselves that we the people um have the ability to talk to one another about the government have the ability to hold the government accountable um so that we can achieve change by peaceful means u rather than by violence. That's the point of the, you know, the first amendment. Uh, but when you see, uh, a a president attacking the first amendment, um, it's kind of like, you know, attacking the the the electoral process. It's it's attacking the, you know, the system itself. And that is a very worrying thing. I don't want to pretend that nothing like this, you know, has happened in recent history. like to some degree, you know, it's happened with a lot of administrations um in modern American history, but I don't think to this degree, you know, the Trump administration really does stand out as um uh you know, deeply hostile to democracy and to the dem and contemptuous of the democratic process. uh quite willing to uh stifle first amendment rights that um you know every other president in recent memory um honored even even if he first you know grumbled about honoring it. I do you have hope that things are going to change like people are said oh the we got the midterms I mean how much damage >> for sure yeah I I mean mo mostly because things were terrible during the first red scare and things were terrible during the second red scare as well right during the McCarthy area era it was um uh you know I've been reading a little bit about it and and have just been surprised at the how close the parallels are, you know, with with so many powerful institutions cowed by uh threats and bullying by government officials. um you know this this kind of uh intense uh panic about particular kinds of threats, overstatement of particular kinds of threats um and a suppression of um free speech and the freedom of of association. And so that that is sort of common that if you look at the first you know the the era right after the uh during and after the first world war and then right after the second world war you see the same kinds of things as we're you know we're seeing now and somehow the the United States managed to you know the phrase I used earlier was reclaim you know re reclaim its democracy and so um you know I I I hope that the fever will at some point break and we'll have a chance to rebuild uh again. But you know, right now it's it's pretty scary. Um uh and even if we can rebuild later, the damage being done right now, a lot of it is irreparable, right? Like you just you think about like any particular individual's life. I mean it's I I spoke in very broad abstraction sometime but sometimes but um I mean just think of like any any of these students you know these these students who um you know worked most of their lives to get admitted to prestigious American universities um uh you know came here invested years in their studies here uh had a vision for what their lives would look like after they graduated. And then um you know suddenly because they exercise the rights that brought them here in the first place like this is why people come to the United States right they they they think well you know this is where freedom is protected um on the basis of the exercise of those freedoms they're you know uh swept they're arrested off the street and you know imprisoned and told you know you're going back back home. I mean just the disruption to any particular person and they're like you know it's it's it's obviously not just the students now who have been you know targeted on the base of their speech but uh you know thousands and thousands of other people who've been targeted uh for all sorts of different reasons and their lives have been you know irreparably disrupted. So even if we have the chance to rebuild our democracy, um you know, a lot of damage has been has been done. >> Okay, any questions? I'd love to have some questions. Yeah, that'd be great. Okay, just you just line up behind one another. It'd be great. >> Hi, thanks so much for that talk. Um my name is Michael Kicholas and I'm the Palmer chair in public policy and the law here. Um, you touched on this in your previous discussion about the unitary executive, but I wanted to ask you about challenges to American democracy beyond Trump. Um, because of course someday Trump will be gone, may not be in a year, may not even be in 3 years, but him being gone is it is a biological reality, but politics is precedent and the political dynamics that he's unleashed will still be there. Um, and I know it's hard to think about rebuilding when the House is still on fire, but I wanted to I would be interested to hear your thoughts about the challenges of restoring America's democratic culture um with specific regard to free speech as your area of focus. Um, do you feel that the First Amendment is still fit for purpose? Um, or are there restorative or repairing measures that are necessary in order to um restore America's uh restore the health of American democracy? >> That that's a great question, but also a very big question. So, um, let let me let me answer just one little piece of it or try to answer at least one little piece of it. Um, I mean, you're you're absolutely right that there are um uh there problems with American democracy that have nothing to do with with Trump. Uh, and there are also problems that pre-existed Trump that Trump is now sort of exploiting. Um, and there are lots of problems that we just didn't see until Trump came along. But now that we've seen them, we realize that they're not just Trump specific. They're, you know, they're they're they're sort of structural. Um I'll give you sort of one example of of um an issue that is sort of more more structural that I think is a really really complex one and a really big deal. So um the the question of of how uh new communications platform should be should be regulated. So the the United States, the the Supreme Court in the United States has become um uh increasingly libertarian since the 1960s. And um first amendment doctrine is very libertarian. And what what that means is that the Supreme Court has been quite hostile to regulation of communications platforms. The one thing it means is that the Supreme Court has been quite hostile to regulation of communications platforms because it sees any regulation that touches on speech as um uh inconsistent with the the First Amendment or or at the very least it it requires that regulation to to meet a very high threshold before it survives first amendment review. And so it's quite difficult for legislators in the United States to regulate communications platforms. And the positive thing about this is that it means that legislators can't um uh regulate in ways that sort of fix the marketplace of ideas or rig the marketplace of ideas. It means that, you know, legislation that uh is meant to uh uh tilt the uh tilt public discourse in one direction is probably going to get struck down by the courts. And and in my view, that's a that's a good thing. Um the the downside is that regulation that might actually serve democratic interests, that might make our democracy stronger, uh is also uh often struck down by the the the courts. The courts just don't distinguish, the courts in the United States don't distinguish uh between regulation that uh touches on speech in ways that should um concern anybody who cares about democracy and regulation that touches on speech in ways that should uh uh be welcomed by anybody who cares about democracy. And this kind of nuance just doesn't exist in First Amendment doctrine. And it's a real problem now because these platforms exercise so much power over you know what speech we hear, what ideas get traction in public discourse. And um this is an area that I think has you know I mean in some ways I think Trump has exploited the the the absence of of regulation here. But the the problem goes beyond Trump. It doesn't matter who the next president is. Uh this is going to be a huge issue and one that the United States um you know hasn't hasn't dealt with and the courts haven't you know the courts haven't um haven't had to deal with but but they they need to. >> Do you have any examples of where they have gone to one side and the other side when you're talking about the regalia? >> Yeah. So so um uh there's a lot of um I'll give you one example. So Florida and Texas 18 months ago or two years ago passed legislation that required social media platforms to carry certain kinds of speech. Um and this was an effort by some conservative legislatures um to uh in their view sort of rebalance social media which they saw as tilted towards liberals and progressives. Um there's no evidence that social media is in fact tilted towards liberals and progressives, but that was their their view. And this legislation was intended to, you know, correct that purported uh imbalance. Um the Supreme Court struck that legislation down uh two years ago. Uh and I I think that was the right decision. The Supreme Court got it right. But the same laws that Florida and Texas passed included other provisions which the Supreme Court largely didn't touch um that relate to uh transparency and due process. So they require the platforms to um uh disclose more information to their users. They require them to explain to their users when their speech is taken down, why it was taken down. Um and those provisions I think are actually um at least arguably positive. They you know we should we should welcome those that kind of accountability the the we should welcome legislation that imposes those kinds of accountability obligations on the platforms. Um but how the how the US courts are going to deal with that kind of legislation I think is a you know very important unanswered question. Some lower courts have sort of taken a categorical view and struck down any legislation that touches on the platforms editorial judgment and this these transparency laws are viewed to touch on editorial judgment. Um and other courts have been more open to uh legislation like this but the Supreme Court for the most part hasn't addressed this you know this set of questions yet and it's a really important set of questions that um I think will confront the Supreme Court one way or another in the next few years. Thank you. Uh I really like what you said. The courage is uh public goods and right now it's under supply. Uh when what when I saw Alex pretty use his body as a wall >> from the female uh protect the female from the ice. I saw what I saw is courage. And then my question is uh the first one is Minnesota is a legal carry uh legal carry state and Alex Py wants licensed permit holder. If the me present of a legal fine firearm is enough for federal agents to cam reasonable fear and use leather force. Thus the second amendment effectively cease to exist during federal enforcement actions. >> Mhm. And the next question is uh Governor Watts has questioned the authority of those federal street teams. When federal agents operate in states with with specific specific carrier laws, whose standards of reasonable force should apply? the states where his carry was legal or the federal government which currently view the presence of gun is a massacre attempt. Thank you. Um, so, so first I I saw Alex Freddy's actions the same way you did, you know. Um, uh, as a small but important exercise of courage, you know, um, and you kind of see that all over in these videos. you you know you see motans um uh making efforts to protect their neighbors and you know even just filming ICE is a way of trying to protect your your neighbors because you know filming um creates the possibility of accountability after and it also deters you know abuse on your question about uh guns I mean I don't actually think that the Trump administration has a consistent line here. Um I I I think that really really their view is that um it depends who's carrying the gun. Like I think that's the you know Rudy Giuliani was once asked whether waterboarding was illegal and he said well depends who's doing it and I kind of feel like that's their view of you know the carrying guns too. Um I I I don't think that they will at the end of the day take the position that um uh people can't carry licensed firearms um in public places because they are very invested in the opposite you know in the opposite rule um on your other question whose standard should should should apply I mean I think it's just one standard it's it's not that there are two different standards I I think that this the rule here comes from the Supreme Court's interpretation of the Second Amendment. You know, the Second Amendment is um you know, in interpreted to allow citizens to carry guns in public places and Minnesota has a concealed carry law, I guess. Um uh I think it's, you know, it's it's it's one standard. the the problem is that these standards are applied in discriminatory or uneven you know uneven ways. Um and you know the Trump administration um the standards of the Trump administration is asserting now in in Minnesota aren't the same ones it was asserting with respect to the the January 6th protesters for example. You know it just has different rules depending on the political viewpoints being expressed by the people who are carrying the guns. Uh, I think that's really what's going on. >> So, I'll be quick because I see there's a couple other students over there. Um, but one of the many um names one could uh use for Trump is he's a very transactional president. Um, and he goes after uh whatever he wants to with in very transactional ways. And when you describe sort of, you know, going after law firms, going after universities, it's very telling that he doesn't go after them collectively. He goes after them individually. Um, and as a consequence, um, there is a sort of, um, a sort of separation, you know, sort of divide and conquer um, element that's going on. What I'm always struck by is the failure then of these, you know, individual sort of universities or firms to actually engage collectively to somehow sort of fight back against that transactional sort of moment. And um so it's not really a first amendment. I guess it is in many all of these are First Amendment or or um liberty questions, but um is there I is there some reason why we're not seeing at that sort of institutional level? We see it on the streets at the individual level, but on the institutional level the failure of a collective action, a failure of collective action and a collective response. >> Yeah. Yeah, I mean I I think it is a first amendment question in this sense or at least a free speech question in this sense that um like the these rights exist in a kind of institutional context and um the um it turns out the political economy matters a lot and we we don't have the universities don't have structures that um encourage them to cooperate in this kind of context. Um they don't have structures sort of already built structures that um that they can rely on to uh to to build collaboration and cooperation in this you know in this context. And there is you know there there are these uh organizations like the American Association of University Professors but at the level of you know the universities and at the university presidents but my impression is that those organizations um you know are not uh particularly well resourced. They haven't been relied on very heavily in the past. Um maybe one lesson of the current moment is that we need to build up those kinds of structures so that you know not just with universities but even with you know with media organizations and with cultural institutions but so that if we're confronted with this kind of this these kinds of threats again those structures and relationships already exist. uh because yeah it's it's been not not just kind of discouraging but surprising that um you know universities have for the most part um interacted with the Trump administration bilaterally you know rather than collectively. >> Um hi I'm Alex I'm a student here. Um, you talked a little bit about um, Israel Palestine and how part of the university's response to that and their collaboration with the Trump administration was perhaps spurned by an existing willingness to go after some of the student protesters in some cases or critique free speech. And we saw some of those sort of not necessarily all out attacks, but a little bit of that free speech being curtailed in terms of campus protests on that issue specifically under the Biden administration with bipartisan support. And still in some cases with bipartisan support and I think you talked about both red scares that was true in both of those cases as well that initially before things got too out of hand and sometimes even after they did get out of hand there was that initial bipartisan institutional support of rooting out sort of wrong think or communists when it threatened a generally accepted idea of what was acceptable. Um so I'm wondering in light of that I guess sort of a two-part question. first of all, how much this is actually Trump specific in terms of the institutional failings versus he's just exploiting cracks that were already there and have already exist always existed in that sort of baseline American institutional framework. And then second of all, if it is more of an institutional failing when we're rebuilding specifically from the attacks from the Trump administration, how do we sort of expand that net of free speech in the future to ensure that it captures everybody and not just sort of what's within a generally politically acceptable realm? So you're I mean you're absolutely right that some of the you know the crackdown on these student protests started before you know before Trump um returned to the o to the Oval Office. And in fact um you know at Colombia uh Colombia called in the police on student protest twice during the Biden administration. Um so at least to some extent um the divisions were already there and Trump you know just exploited them but he did exploit them you know um I mean students were being arrested before Trump came along but they weren't being imprisoned and deported and that's you know that's an important that's an important uh difference and then you know as I as I mentioned And you know, Trump Trump has taken the powers that um uh were initially used against these students and now just started to use them much more, you know, much more more more broadly. Um, but I also think that, you know, you're right about the parallel that if you go back to the second, you know, the second red scare. It, you know, wasn't just McCarthy. It was, you know, the Democrats too were, uh, you know, concerned about communist infiltration of the government. And, um, uh, you know, that grew into the the the Red Scare. But um you know the the second part of your your question is you know a huge question this question of like how do we ensure that the first amendment protects you know protects everyone. I mean, I I I do think that there's an opportunity for the Supreme Court. If the Supreme Court is actually invested in um if the Supreme Court actually believes in the First Amendment, this would be a great time for the Supreme Court to uh you know issue a kind of historic ruling relating to these students who, you know, were arrested for their pro Palestinian political advocacy because it would demonstrate that um you know, they're serious when they say that, you know, this is a a protection that extends to everybody. It's not just available to the people we agree with. It's available to the people we disagree with, you know, as well. And you know, the great first amendment decisions were, you know, were decisions in which uh everybody understood that the Supreme Court um probably disagreed pretty vehemently with the speech um that was at issue in those cases and yet protected it, you know. So, uh, it's, you know, I don't want to be too sort of, uh, stareyed or or or or have too rosy a picture of what might happen here, but, you know, it it's not totally inconceivable that, um, we come out of this with a reaffirmation of, you know, the First Amendment that, um, you know, draws in a lot of people who have lost faith in not just the first amendment, but the idea that uh these protections are really for everybody. >> Are are there cases that are going up to the Supreme Court uh in this in these matters that they will have to >> I mean, I think this case that you know that we've been talking about, the AUP case will go up to the Supreme Court. Um uh in fact, you know, we we got Judge Judge Young issued um some very significant relief, including, you know, declaring the policy unconstitutional. And almost certainly the Trump administration is going to ask the appeals court and then the Supreme Court to stay that relief. And so the case may be up in the Supreme Court on what they call the shadow docket um you know, in the in the next couple of months. I think we have one more student um if you wanted to up and then um maybe Dr. has one last thing. >> Um thank you. I'll try and ask my question without being too redundant, but I find it interesting that since like independence, there's been a lot of theory that America is only operating with a countdown in the background and that there's only so long that they can have like a democracy as they've designed it. And when you I'm also trying to maybe challenge a bit gently your idea that people are able and like see um an opportunity to reclaim their democracy cuz a lot of people thought they were doing just that when they voted for Trump, right? Like he positioned himself as he was going to like come in and drain the swamp and now they're seeing like a bit of a disillusionment. Do you think that Americans feel like they can only go back and forth for so long? cuz surely the next election people won't like gain an appetite to vote Democrat like and then also too I thought it was interesting your reference to the red scares cuz those are more spread apart events and there's a bit of a recovery in between whereas now you just have so many scandals that we've accepted a new normal in democracy and it's very pessimistic and cynical. We have very sensationalist news. we have total lack of faith in politicians and I'm curious if you think that the system is kind of in a later stage or if you think it will kind of self-correct because we'll get close to the edge and then pull ourselves back. And I I could see that happening cuz the Canadian election was a bit staggered behind the American election and we kind of were on course to vote more conservatively and then you can see like it's a bit of a global phenomenon that people are more reluctant now to kind of be um drawn in by those narratives. >> Yeah. Um I mean such such great questions. I um so one one one thing that um maybe I see a little bit differently than you do. So I don't think it's just back and forth. I don't think that that we're going just just back and forth. It's true that we go back and forth between Democrats and Republicans, but you know, Biden was quite different from Obama and you know, the next person might be quite different from either of them. And um in in in some ways um you know, you're you're right that I think a lot of people who voted for Trump wanted to reclaim their you know, their their democracy. Um I pe people might want to reclaim their democracy for different reasons, right? And so some people I think were just uh frustrated is too weak a word but frustrated that um the sort of spoils of um uh of the last 20 or 30 years have have been distributed so unfairly that uh you know the United States is the wealthiest nation in the history of the world and yet you know so many people in the United states live in poverty and not just you know not not just poverty in the sense that they don't have any money but they just don't have any uh even the institutions around them are um uh you know poor and thin. Um the media which you referenced you know it's uh is not serving the purpose we need it to serve. There's no local news anymore. Um, and you know, it's not inconceivable that some of the people who voted for Trump could join together with some of the people who didn't vote for him, um, and try to reclaim a different kind of, you know, democracy. So, I I don't know. I'm not I'm not ready to kind of give up on the whole, you know, give up on the the the whole thing. Um, and uh, you know, when I see all these people out in the streets in in in Minneapolis and and and around the country, you know, that gives me faith that, you know, there are a lot of Americans who want things to be better. Um, and who, you know, they care about their their neighbors. They feel solidarity with the people around them. And um you so they don't it's not just that they want things to be better for themselves that they they want a better country and um so I guess I'm not not ready to write it off yet. >> Thank you. >> Uh I want to thank you very much for this evening and uh >> but I have a final >> Oh, sorry. Oh, I'm so sorry. I didn't see >> Yes. Yes. I want to thank you very much for your address this evening and your discussion. I think if my father Dean Horus Reed were here, he'd be very happy and that you're around and pursuing all these efforts. I just have I'd like your com quick comments on two quick questions maybe to wind things up and that is what about two possible quick solutions and the first is what if the American uh college of uh uh law school American association of law schools or whatever orb universities would all get together making it a class action suit all across the country all united saying that and and it's lawyers after all who know all the right things to say to reverse all those bilateral agreements to keep things with funding but back like Harvard continues to be and just do that and reverse all those bilateral agreements get all those issues uh this student thing and the issues and greatly speak that's kind of a side issue but all those other things that Colombia for instance has had restricted by their agreement reverse all that get rid of it with a class action suit just get together and do it that's number one the other possible quick solution I've heard that the 15th man amendment has a mechanism whereby by a vote if it passes in the in the Senate and the legislature could get Trump out and soon. And I wonder if there's a possibility of that, whether there are enough Republicans now getting disturbed over things like Greenland and Minneapolis and so on, or if certainly after the midterms after this fall, if there's a few more Democrats as opposed to Republicans and enough Republicans to agree to get rid of this disgusting guy um if that 15th amendment could be used and passed in those in the two houses if not before after the midterms. >> So on on the second point um sounds like a great idea. I don't think that there is the support for it now. Uh maybe there will be after the the the midterms. Uh but you know this has been everybody's it's been a dream of many people uh from almost the day Trump took office the first time um that you know there would be enough Republicans to support um uh you know either impeachment or um getting him out on the basis of mental incapacity. But there just has not been that kind of support and there isn't right now. On the on the first point, yes, absolutely. That's what that's what they should have done. I don't know if it's a class action or just a you know a suit in which many universities were plaintiffs but um they should have they should have acted together uh um to sue over you know a whole a whole set of these um policies that the Trump administration imposed on the universities. >> Yeah, you're preaching to the choir. >> Okay. Hey, I just want to have uh thank very much Jaffer for tonight and his insights and [applause] thank you. >> Yeah, thank you very much.