On September 25-26, 2026, the Knight First Amendment Institute will host a work-in-progress workshop for a forthcoming scholarly essay series, “Lawyering Without Law: The Legal Profession in an Age of Authoritarianism.”

This workshop and essay series are part of a broader project on the legal profession and authoritarianism, organized by the Knight Institute in partnership with our Senior Fellow Madhav Khosla, the Dr. B.R. Ambedkar Professor of Indian Constitutional Law at Columbia University. This project seeks to spark public debate and generate new scholarship that will galvanize members of the legal profession in the United States and abroad to reflect on their roles in defending the rule of law and democratic values, and help them be more effective at doing so. It also includes a new biweekly podcast that interrogates the unique and important role that lawyers play in defending democracy, or in facilitating the slide into authoritarianism, co-hosted by Khosla and the Institute’s Research Director Katy Glenn Bass.

The essay series will explore, among other questions, how differing conceptions of the legal profession contribute to lawyers’ role in either resisting authoritarianism or accommodating it, how bar associations maintain—or lose—their independence in inhospitable political environments, and how democratic backsliding can occur through the working of ordinary legal rules and practices. We are excited to announce that the following scholars and jurists will participate in the September 2026 workshop, and many of them will contribute essays to the series:

Lukman Adebisi Abdulrauf, University of Ilorin

Payam Akhavan, University of Toronto

Aslı Bâli, Yale University

John Coates, Harvard University

Scott Cummings, University of California, Los Angeles

Max du Plessis, Doughty Street Chambers, Senior Counsel, South Africa

David Dyzenhaus, University of Toronto

Vicki C. Jackson, Harvard University

Jeff King, University College London

Daniel Markovits, Yale University

Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Princeton University

Deborah Pearlstein, Princeton University