Jameel Jaffer

About

Jameel Jaffer, director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and former Deputy Legal Director of the ACLU, oversaw the ACLU’s work relating to national security for almost a decade and litigated some of the most significant cases concerning U.S. counterterrorism policy after 9/11. A prominent commentator and speaker on issues relating to civil liberties and human rights, Jaffer has written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Index on Censorship, and the Harvard Law Review Forum, among other publications, and is the author of The Drone Memos: Targeted Killing, Secrecy, and the Law (The New Press) and co-author with Amrit Singh of Administration of Torture: A Documentary Record from Washington to Abu Ghraib and Beyond. Canadian Journalists for Free Expression awarded Jaffer the Vox Libera Award in 2015 and Foreign Policy magazine listed him as one of its “Top 100 Global Thinkers” in 2012. He lives in Brooklyn.