Nadine Strossen

Nadine Strossen is the John Marshall Harlan II Professor of Law Emerita at New York Law School and was the former national President of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1991 to 2008. With more than 30 years of experience in First Amendment law, Strossen is a leading expert and frequent speaker/media commentator on constitutional law and civil liberties, who has testified before Congress on multiple occasions. The National Law Journal has named Strossen one of America’s “100 Most Influential Lawyers,” and she serves on the advisory boards of the ACLU, Academic Freedom Alliance, Heterodox Academy, and National Coalition Against Censorship. When Strossen stepped down as ACLU President, three (ideologically diverse) Supreme Court Justices participated in her farewell/tribute luncheon: Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Antonin Scalia, and David Souter.
Strossen is the author of multiple books, including HATE: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship (2018) and Free Speech: What Everyone Needs to Know (2023). She is also a host and project consultant for Free To Speak, a 3-hour documentary film series on free speech distributed on PBS in 2023. Her book Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women’s Rights was named by The New York Times as “notable book” of 1995 and was republished in 2024 as part of the New York University Press “Classics” series. Her book HATE was selected as the “Common Read” by Washington University and Washburn University.
Her many honorary degrees and awards include the American Bar Association’s prestigious Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement Award (2017). In 2023, the National Coalition Against Censorship (an alliance of more than 50 national non-profit organizations) selected Strossen for its Lifetime Achievement Award for Free Speech. Strossen has made thousands of public presentations before diverse audiences around the world, including on more than 500 different campuses and in many foreign countries, and she has appeared on virtually every national TV news program.
Recent Writings
- Web designer’s free speech Supreme Court victory is a win for all,
- Who’s allowed to teach ‘Culture in America’? ,
- One Weird Trick for Fixing Elections,
- That Facebook post about abortion could land you in jail — if South Carolina legislators have their way,
- ‘Naive Statism’ and how the Rwandan genocide was not about Rwanda’s excessive commitment to free speech: Part 18 of answers to arguments against free speech from Nadine Strossen and Greg Lukianoff,
- Censorship won’t cure disinformation (featuring Jacob Mchangama and Nadine Strossen): Part 17 of answers to arguments against free speech,
- Would censorship have stopped the rise of the Nazis? Part 16 of answers to arguments against free speech from Nadine Strossen and Greg Lukianoff,
- Is counterspeech the best answer to bad speech? Part 15 of answers to arguments against free speech from Nadine Strossen and Greg Lukianoff,
- Shouting down speakers is mob censorship: Part 14 of answers to arguments against free speech from Nadine Strossen and Greg Lukianoff,
- Does free speech ‘inevitably’ lead towards truth? Is the ‘Marketplace of Ideas’ a broken metaphor? Part 13 of answers to arguments against free speech from Nadine Strossen and Greg Lukianoff,

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