Event Profile

Go Back

2012 AALS Annual Meeting Theme:
Academic Freedom and Academic Duty

The theme for the 2012 Annual Meeting centers around academic freedom and academic duty – including threats to tenure and to academic freedom, and the concomitant academic duty obligations that arise out of our status as tenured professors. There have been many serious threats to academic freedom arising from the environment and the polity: a law faculty member arrested in Rwanda for his pro bono representation of an opposition candidate in an election matter there; a law faculty-journal editor sued for criminal libel in France for publishing a book review; law school clinics reviled for their work as well as threatened legislatively and in the courts in Maryland, Louisiana, Michigan, New Jersey, and in several other states; a law scholar sued for her research on family law, whose university chose not to indemnify her; a law review that pulled a piece from publication, following threats from the company criticized in the article; and other law faculty and non-law faculty punished for their views.

The zone of protected professorial speech is shrinking. In the 2006 Garcetti v. Ceballos case, the Supreme Court ruled that when public employees speak “pursuant to their official duties, the employees are not speaking as citizens for First Amendment purposes, and the Constitution does not insulate their communications from employer discipline,” regardless of whether or not the speech involves a “matter of public concern.” Almost immediately, this limited decision was used by lower courts to allow public colleges to sanction faculty who would not have been punished for their views before Garcetti. Legal scholars and the academy have begun to recognize that this case will likely negatively impact college governance policies and practices.

The academy must identify and contend with these external threats as they arise both in legal education and in other fields of study. These programs will draw additional attention to international threats to law professors and academics around the world, as exemplified by the admirable work conducted by Scholars at Risk, who try and rescue these imperiled colleagues to safer situations. Attention must be paid to these examples, which are too common and which diminish us all, even when seemingly-remote threats arise; the bell tolls on behalf of us all. In addition, sessions will spell out the correlative obligations to undertake service and draw attention to the features inherent in academic duty.

There are many other threats as well, such as law school accreditors considering de-coupling their tenure requirements from their insistence upon academic freedom, and no longer requiring a system of tenure or security of position. It is difficult to square these developments with the increased attention we at AALS have paid to our core values. Arguments for tenure include that the promise of continual employment gives