This year’s Enlund Lecture will trace the judicial development of academic freedom as a First Amendment right of professors, beginning in 1957, and the judicial extension of that right to universities, beginning in the 1970s. Courts have clearly recognized academic freedom as a First Amendment right but have disagreed about its scope. Nor have they developed its meaning, as judges themselves have often acknowledged.
Professor Rabban will assert that academic freedom should be understood as a distinctive First Amendment right that protects the expert academic speech of professors and the educational decisions of universities. Academic freedom is related to—but distinct from—the general First Amendment rights of political expression. He will conclude by applying this understanding to recent interventions by federal and state governments into university affairs.
2025 Enlund Scholar-in-Residence David M. Rabban is the Dahr Jamail, Randall Hage Jamail and Robert Lee Jamail Regents Chair and University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas School of Law. Before joining the Texas faculty in 1983, he served as counsel to the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), later becoming its general counsel from 1998 to 2006 and chair of its Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure from 2006 to 2012.
Professor Rabban’s teaching and research focus on free speech, higher education and the law, and American legal 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 articles have appeared in Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, Cambridge Law Journal, and other leading publications. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2016 and a fellow at Princeton University’s Program in Law and Public Affairs in 2016–2017. His most recent book, Academic Freedom: From Professional Norm to First Amendment Right, was published by Harvard University Press in 2024.
The Enlund Scholar-in-Residence Program
Established in 1988, thanks to a gift from the late E. Stanley Enlund (JD ’42), the Enlund Scholar-in-Residence Program attracts the nation’s foremost legal minds. Enlund scholars provide the College of Law community of students, faculty,
alumni and friends with differing perspectives on law,
lawyers and social justice.