Free Expression in a Climate of Self-Censorship

A National Survey of American Law Faculty

from Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, June, 2026

This report presents findings from a national survey of 1,959 law school faculty at 192 American Bar Association (ABA) approved law schools in the United States, conducted by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). As one of the largest surveys of law faculty on free expression and professional norms, the data reveal a profession that strongly endorses free speech principles while struggling to live them out in practice. 

Key findings include:

A majority of law faculty say American legal education is heading in the wrong direction. 

Law faculty strongly endorse free speech in principle, but often struggle to practice it. Nearly nine in ten say offensive speech used for a pedagogical purpose deserves complete protection, yet a majority report feeling unable to express their opinions at their law school.

Law faculty broadly reject the Obama-era Department of Education’s expansive approach to hostile-environment harassment: 62% say the guidance on what expression could be punished was too broad. By contrast, a majority (54%) say the Supreme Court’s narrower standard strikes the right balance.

More than nine in ten law faculty surveyed support adopting written policies encouraging free expression. 

Most law faculty find required DEI statements unjustifiable as a condition of hiring or promotion.

Most (54%) law faculty say a liberal individual would be a very positive fit in their law school, compared to 16% who say the same for a conservative. 

Law faculty are far more willing to attribute anti-conservative bias to their colleagues than to acknowledge it in themselves: 56% say colleagues would penalize a notably conservative job candidate versus 22% who admit they themselves would. The same pattern also holds for mentoring a notably conservative student: 32% versus 7%.

Conservative law faculty experience a sharply different climate than their liberal colleagues: 61% of conservative faculty say their law school is hostile toward people with their political beliefs, compared to 11% of liberal faculty, and three times as many hide their political beliefs to keep their job (52% versus 17%).

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Introduction

For nearly a decade, Ken Lawson — a criminal law instructor at the University of Hawai’i — used a classroom hypothetical to teach first-year law students the concept of “transferred intent,” which is the doctrine invoked when a defendant intends to harm one person, but ends up harming another instead. To help teach the concept, Lawson included in his lecture slides photos of real colleagues — including two deans at the law school — in a hypothetical scenario in which one shoots at the other, but accidentally hits Lawson instead. 

Screenshot of part of Lawson’s lesson. Two law school deans, left, and Lawson, right, in a scenario in which one of them shoots and kills Lawson.

Over the years, Lawson rotated different deans and administrators into these roles, creating a kind of vivid, if slightly irreverent, scenario. This is exactly the kind of technique that law professors have long used to bring dry and abstract legal principles to life. It’s the kind of example that makes students sit up and lean forward, and what makes the topic memorable. Simply put, it’s good teaching.

But in September 2024, an anonymous student filed a complaint against Lawson,[1] calling the hypothetical example “extremely disturbing,” in part because actual shootings that had recently taken place in the U.S. and near the campus. In subsequent meetings, school administrators told Lawson his slides and hypothetical example had not violated any law or university policy, but that he had to change them anyway. When Lawson refused, the school administrators went into the school’s online curriculum system and made the changes themselves, replacing the photos of the deans with generic silhouettes. They left the photo of Lawson himself as the hypothetical shooting victim, however, untouched. 

Screenshot of part of Lawson’s lesson changed by school administrators. Two generic silhouettes, left, and Lawson, right, in a scenario in which one of them shoots and kills Lawson.

So what happened? A law instructor at a public university, well within his academic freedom rights, had some of his teaching materials rewritten by administrators because someone found them uncomfortable.

Lawson’s experience is striking, but not isolated. It reflects a pattern that some legal scholars have observed for years: a gradual narrowing in how law faculty teach, or in what some feel free to teach, with some limiting or avoiding topics they consider “too hot to handle.”[2] In a law review essay on the Socratic method,[3] which pre-dates Lawson’s experience by seven years, Harvard Law School professor Jeannie Suk Gersen pointed to something similar: colleagues quietly altering how they teach laws about rape, treating some difficult questions as requiring exceptional handling, considering trigger warnings, and avoiding or limiting course materials involving sex, violence, or race. These actions were not generally in response to formal mandates or content restrictions, but instead reflected what Suk Gersen described as a self-protective desire to avoid running afoul of hard-to-predict law student sensibilities.

This retreat is significant because legal education’s paradigmatic teaching method depends on the very discomfort some faculty are now working to avoid. The Socratic tradition, a prominent characteristic of American legal education since the 1870s, rests on the premise that productive discomfort — being called on without warning, made to defend a position one does not hold, forced to reason aloud about cases not yet mastered — is central, not incidental, to legal training. 

Lawyers, judges, and citizens in a pluralistic democracy must be capable of engaging with discomfort and with difficult material. Law classrooms that cannot model that engagement, Suk Gersen argues, are poorly equipped to produce graduates (or citizens) capable of sustaining it. Yet when discomfort is treated as evidence of harm and labeled as trauma, and faculty avoid or limit difficult material, an essential element of legal training begins to erode. 

Lawson’s experience demonstrates what that erosion looks like in a single classroom, occurring even where no official rule was broken. But new data suggest that the underlying conditions have taken hold across the legal academy. What Lawson encountered as a single incident, and what Suk Gersen identified as a pattern in some classes, the present survey provides evidence for at scale, pointing toward a profession whose stated commitments and actual experiences have diverged. 

read … FULL REPORT

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About FIRE 

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to defending and sustaining the individual rights of all Americans to free speech and free thought. These rights include freedom of speech, freedom of association, due process, legal equality, religious liberty, and sanctity of conscience — the most essential qualities of liberty. FIRE also recognizes that colleges and universities play a vital role in preserving free thought within a free society. To this end, we place a special emphasis on defending these rights of students and faculty members on our nation’s campuses, including the right to academic freedom for faculty.

For more information, visit fire.org or @thefireorg on X.

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