Jameel Jaffer

Jameel Jaffer is a Canadian human rights and civil liberties attorney and the inaugural director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, which was created to defend the freedoms of speech and the press in the digital age. The Institute engages in "strategic litigation, research, and public education." Among the Knight Institute's first lawsuits was a successful constitutional challenge to President Trump's practice of blocking critics from his Twitter account.

Jaffer was previously a Deputy Legal Director at the American Civil Liberties Union. In that role, he was particularly notable for the role he played in litigating Freedom of Information Act requests that led to the release of documents concerning the torture of prisoners held at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp and in CIA black sites. Among the documents released were interrogation directives signed by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld; emails written by FBI agents who witnessed the torture of prisoners; autopsy reports relating to prisoners who were killed in U.S. custody; and legal memos in which the Office of Legal Counsel stated that so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" involving mental and physical torment and coercion that were widely regarded as torture might be legally permissible under an expansive interpretation of presidential authority. The New York Times billed the lawsuit "one of the most successful in the history of public disclosure."

Jaffer grew up in Canada and is a graduate of Upper Canada College, a private school in Toronto.

In 2004, Jaffer litigated a successful constitutional challenge to the USA Patriot Act, obtaining a federal court ruling that invalidated the "national security letter" provision. After Congress amended the law, the federal district court invalidated the provision again in 2007.

In 2006, Jaffer filed a case challenging the Bush administration's refusal to issue a visa to Tariq Ramadan, a well-known Islamic thinker. After that ruling, the Obama administration reversed the exclusion of Dr. Ramadan and issued him a visa.

In 2012 and 2013, Jaffer argued two successful appeals, one before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and another before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, relating to the Obama administration's refusal to release Justice Department memos concerning the "targeted killing" program.

In 2012, Jaffer argued Clapper v. Amnesty International USA before the U.S. Supreme Court. The case involved a constitutional challenge to a federal statute that gave the National Security Agency broad power to monitor international communications. The Supreme Court ruled against the plaintiffs 5-4, holding that they lacked "standing" to bring their suit.

Along with Jimmy Wales and Lila Tretikov of the Wikimedia Foundation, Jaffer filed a lawsuit in March 2015 against the National Security Agency (NSA) challenging the agency's surveillance activities "through which the U.S. government intercepts, copies, and searches almost all international and many domestic text-based communications" on the Wikimedia platform.

Between 2010 and 2016, Jaffer co-led the litigation that resulted in the disclosure of the Obama administration's "drone memos." Jaffer's book about the U.S. drone campaign, The Drone Memos: Targeted Killing, Secrecy, and the Law, was published by The New Press in November 2016. Edward Snowden called the book "a much-needed corrective to the linguistic manipulation and official obfuscation that have made [the targeted-killing] policies possible." He litigated cases relating to national security and human rights, including cases concerning surveillance, torture, rendition, and "targeted killing."

Jaffer is an Executive Editor of Just Security, a national security blog.

Honors and awards In 2026, the Sidney Hillman Foundation gave Jaffer the George Barrett Award for Public Interest Law and Brooklyn Law School selected him for the Distinguished Commitment to Public Service Award.

Community events Jaffer was invited to celebrate Ramadan at the White House in 2009.