Jacob Mchangama and Jeff Kosseff on the future of free speech
Two leading free speech scholars examine the global decline of expression rights and propose a framework for preserving them against authoritarian threats.
Why we picked this
Free expression is under pressure from every direction — governments, platforms, mobs. These two have written the most rigorous recent books on the subject, and this is a rare chance to hear them together.
The global retreat of free expression is one of the defining political stories of this decade, and it’s being driven by actors across the political spectrum. Jacob Mchangama and Jeff Kosseff bring complementary expertise — Mchangama from the international human rights perspective, Kosseff from the American constitutional tradition — to a question that grows more urgent by the month.
Together they examine what’s actually happening to speech rights worldwide, why traditional frameworks are failing, and what a defensible position for free expression might look like in an era of disinformation, platform power, and democratic backsliding.
Free at Politics and Prose on Connecticut Avenue.