Jameel Jaffer

Jameel Jaffer is a leading civil liberties attorney, renowned for his advocacy in free speech and national security, shaping digital age legal discourse. After leading litigation teams that compelled the Bush administration to disclose the “torture memos” and the Obama administration to release the “drone memos,” Jameel Jaffer’s efforts at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) also led to the National Security Agency abandoning its dragnet surveillance of Americans’ call records, with The New York Times acknowledging one of his transparency cases as ‘among the most successful in the history of public disclosure.’ Jaffer joined the ACLU in June 2002, serving in various leadership positions until August 2016, ultimately as deputy legal director, overseeing the organization’s work on democracy, free speech, privacy, technology, national security, and international human rights. During this tenure, he successfully litigated a constitutional challenge to the USA Patriot Act’s national security letter provision in 2004 and argued Clapper v. Amnesty International USA before the U.S.

He was also honored at the Columbia Law Review’s annual banquet in 2015 and the Harvard Law Review’s annual banquet in 2022. In recent years, Jameel Jaffer has delivered prestigious addresses such as the Salant Lecture on Freedom of the Press at Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center in 2017 and the Peter Zenger Lecture at Columbia Journalism School. His sustained work continues to shape legal protections for digital age liberties.