Professor Soucek named Fellow at UC National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement

Professor Brian Soucek has been named a 2020-21 Fellow at the UC National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement. The new fellows will help the institute continue its work helping educational institutions and communities foster and protect free speech and engagement.

Soucek’s project, "Institutional Values, Academic Freedom, and the First Amendment,” was one of 10 selected from a highly competitive field. He was the only UC faculty member selected.

His project asks what happens when a university’s institutional values collide with the academic freedom and First Amendment rights of its faculty, students, or staff. He will be looking in particular at the University of California’s use of diversity statements and its ban on travel to states hostile to LGBTQ rights.

Professor Soucek’s primary teaching and research interests are antidiscrimination law, civil procedure, constitutional law, and refugee/asylum law. He holds a J.D. from Yale Law School and a Ph.D from Columbia University. He has clerked for U.S. District Court Judge Mark R. Kravitz in Connecticut, and Judge Guido Calabresi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.