In this episode of A Book with Legs, Cole Smead, CEO and Portfolio Manager at Smead Capital Management, sits down with Erwin Chemerinsky to discuss his book, “Campus Speech and Academic Freedom: A Guide for Difficult Times,” co-authored with Howard Gillman.

Erwin Chemerinsky is the 13th Dean of Berkeley Law and the Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law. Before joining Berkeley in 2017, he served as founding Dean of UC Irvine School of Law. He is one of the nation’s leading constitutional scholars, the author of more than twenty books, including leading casebooks on constitutional law, criminal procedure, and federal jurisdiction, and a regular advocate before the United States Supreme Court. His deanship at Berkeley Law has been extended through 2029.

The conversation starts from the premise that a university cannot punish an idea just because it clashes with the school’s mission, then works through where campuses keep losing the line between what the law allows and what is wise. They cover the heckler’s veto and Stanford Law’s disruption of Judge Kyle Duncan, Berkeley’s multimillion-dollar security bill for controversial speakers, inconsistent enforcement of encampment rules after October 7, content neutrality, Title VI hostile-environment duties, DEI statements as a hiring screen, and hard cases including Hamline, Kilborn, Amy Wax, and Ilya Shapiro. Chemerinsky’s through line is viewpoint neutrality: protect the speech you loathe, punish disruption rather than ideas, and do not pretend doing nothing is always legal when a hostile environment is in play.

“Campus Speech and Academic Freedom: A Guide for Difficult Times,” published by Yale University Press, is available now.

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