NEW YORK–The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University announced today that Sam Lebovic, an associate professor of history at George Mason University, will join the Institute later this year as a visiting research scholar. His project will grapple with how a modern, bureaucratized American government should manage the speech of its employees while balancing competing democratic values. Throughout the 2023-2024 academic year, Lebovic will convene a series of workshops on the subject of public employee speech rights that will culminate in a major symposium in the spring of 2024 at Columbia University.

“All of us at the Knight Institute have learned a great deal from Professor Lebovic’s insightful and engaging scholarship on press freedom, civil liberties in wartime, and the pathologies of public discourse,” said Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute.  “We’re delighted to have the chance to work with him.”

By examining historical and legal issues pertaining to public employee speech rights, Lebovic seeks to delineate a philosophy and doctrine for the First Amendment that both protects civil liberties and enables collective governance. This project will begin with a series of workshops to bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to discuss works-in-progress, leading up to a spring symposium at which the papers will be presented.

“Many of our most pressing political debates today implicate the speech rights of government employees, including questions about what can be said in public schools, the extent of protections for national security whistleblowers, and restrictions on government-funded research. We’re thrilled to partner with Professor Lebovic to build on the scholarship in this area,” said Katy Glenn Bass, the Knight Institute’s research director.

“The complexity of the issues involved in the subject make it not only difficult and important but also potentially generative,” said Lebovic.  “Thinking more clearly about the underlying principles will help clarify such legal subfields as academic freedom, public employment, and transparency as well as produce new ideas about the role of public employee speech in American democracy.”

In addition to Lebovic, the Institute will also be joined this fall by visiting senior research scholars RonNell Andersen Jones, Lee E. Teitelbaum professor of law at the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law, and Sonja R. West, Otis Brumby Distinguished Professor in First Amendment law at the University of Georgia School of Law. The Institute’s current visiting scholars are Arvind Narayanan, a professor of computer science at Princeton University, and J. Nathan Matias, an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Cornell University. Previous visiting scholars include Genevieve Lakier, a professor of law at the University of Chicago; Ethan Zuckerman, an associate professor of public policy, information, and communication at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and director of the Institute for Digital Public Infrastructure; Amy Kapczynski, a professor of law at Yale Law School and faculty co-director of the Law and Political Economy Project; Jamal Greene, Dwight Professor of Law at Columbia Law School; and David Pozen, Charles Keller Beekman Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. 

Learn more about the Knight Institute’s Visiting Research Scholars program here.  

For more information, contact: Adriana Lamirande, adriana.lamirande@knightcolumbia.org.