From Professional Norm to First Amendment Right

About the panel

David Rabban served as counsel to the American Association of University Professors for several years before joining the Texas faculty in 1983. He served as General Counsel of the AAUP from 1998 to 2006 and Chair of its Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure from 2006 to 2012. His teaching and research focus on free speech, higher education and the law, and American legal history. He is best known for his path-breaking work on free speech in American history. He is the author of Free Speech in Its Forgotten Years, 1870-1920 (Cambridge,1997), which received the Forkosch Prize from the Journal of the History of Ideas for “the best book in intellectual history published in 1997.” His many articles have appeared in Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review and elsewhere. He was a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation in 2016 and of the Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton University in 2016-17. His most recent book is Law’s History: American Legal Thought and the Transatlantic Turn to History.

Professor Timothy J. Lynch is professor of American politics and co-chair of the political science discipline in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne. His latest book, In the Shadow of the Cold War: American Foreign Policy from George Bush Sr. to Donald Trump (Cambridge, 2020), has been called ‘a cogent, graceful, provocative account’ of its subject. In 2022-23, Tim was the Milward L. Simpson Visiting Fulbright Professor at the University of Wyoming, in America’s reddest state. His other books include Turf War: the Clinton Administration and Northern Ireland (2004) and US Foreign Policy and Democracy Promotion (2013). His co-authored book, After Bush: the Case for Continuity in American Foreign Policy (Cambridge, 2008), won the Richard Neustadt Book Prize and became a best-selling international security text.

Professor Adrienne Stone is Melbourne Laureate Professor and Director of the Centre for Comparative Constitutional Studies at Melbourne Law School. She researches in the areas of constitutional law and theory in Australia and globally, freedom of expression and academic freedom. As Kathleen Fitzpatrick Australian Laureate Fellow (2016-2021), she established and directed the Laureate Program in Comparative Constitutional Law which developed a significant research capacity in comparative constitutional law at Melbourne Law School. Among her recent publications, she is the author (with Carolyn Evans) of Open Minds: Academic Freedom and Freedom of Speech (2021). With Cheryl Saunders AO she is editor of the Oxford Handbook on the Australian Constitution (2018) and with Frederick Schauer, she is editor of the Oxford Handbook on Freedom of Speech (2021).

Lael Weis is an Associate Professor at Melbourne Law School. Her research lies at the intersection of constitutional legal theory, democratic political theory, and comparative constitutional law. She uses philosophical methods and comparative constitutional law to analyse issues in constitutional theory, including how legislation is used as a source of constitutional meaning, how constitutional amendment figures in approaches to constitutional interpretation, and how courts reason about constitutional duties, such as directive principles. Her current research project explores environmental constitutionalism and how constitutions can allocate institutional responsibility for environmental protection. She is a General Editor for the journal Comparative Constitutional Studies.

^{Photo by Dom Fou on Unsplash}