Joe Cohn Joins the Center for Academic Freedom and Free Speech as Executive Director
Joe Cohn has joined the Center for Academic Freedom and Free Speech (CAFFS) at Yale Law School as its founding executive director.
Cohn is a 2000 graduate of the University of Nevada at Las Vegas where he earned a bachelor of arts degree, and a 2004 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Carey School of Law and its Fels Institute of Government, where he earned a J.D. and master’s in government administration.
Throughout his career, Cohn has championed civil liberties. Early on, he fought for the rights of individuals with HIV/AIDS as a staff attorney at the AIDS Law Project of Pennsylvania, and briefed immigration, prisoner civil rights, and habeas corpus cases as a staff attorney at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit in cases where one of the parties was proceeding pro se. He also lectured and supervised law students as an adjunct professor in the University of Pennsylvania’s Gittis Civil Practice Clinic, where his students represented people in state and federal litigation.
A majority of Cohn’s legal career has been dedicated to defending free speech rights and campus civil liberties. Prior to joining CAFFS, he served as the interim legal director of American Civil Liberties Union affiliates in Nevada and Utah, where he managed federal dockets that included several complex First Amendment cases. For a dozen years, Cohn served as the founding director of the legislative and policy department at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), one of the country’s preeminent, nonpartisan organization defending open inquiry, academic freedom, and freedom of expression in higher education and now in the United States generally.
At FIRE, Cohn authored nearly 25 laws that have been enacted, often with unanimous or near unanimous support, in legislatures across the country, providing protections for free expression, academic freedom, and due process on college campuses. In that role, he repeatedly testified in Congress and secured important protections for expression in federal regulations.
Immediately before joining CAFFS, Cohn continued his work advancing academic freedom and free speech on campus as the director of policy for Heterodox Academy, a worldwide membership organization of faculty dedicated to promoting open inquiry in higher education.
“In our increasingly polarized times, nonpartisan, principled defense of academic freedom and free speech is becoming increasingly rare, and unfortunately increasingly needed,” Cohn said. “I’m honored to continue my life’s work advancing those values at Yale Law School’s Center for Academic Freedom and Free Speech and believe we can provide leadership that will make a difference at Yale University and beyond.”
Cohn has written extensively on civil liberties, with articles published in a wide array of media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Newsweek, the Hill, the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, the Las Vegas Review Journal, the Minnesota Star Tribune, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, and the Volokh Conspiracy.
“With Joe as our executive director, CAFFS has added an individual with a long track record of successful free speech and academic freedom advocacy,” said Keith Whittington, the David Boies Professor of Law and the center’s faculty director. “I’m excited to work with Joe. Together, CAFFS will tackle today’s deepest challenges that threaten academic freedom and free speech.”
CAFFS aims to become a leading hub for academic freedom and free speech, seeking to safeguard these values for future generations. The center brings to campus scholars, university leaders, advocates, and policymakers for both private workshops and public events to discuss the state of free speech and academic freedom, best policies and practices for realizing a robust culture of free speech, and the future of free speech and academic freedom in the United States and across the world.
The center helps track emerging threats to academic freedom, advocate for policies to protect free speech and academic freedom, foster better understanding of and appreciation for the principles of free speech and free inquiry, and support scholarly and public conversations on critical issues relating to free speech and academic freedom.
