Dean’s Distinguished Speaker Series Launches With Christine Lagarde and Tom Ginsburg

At Dean’s Distinguished Speaker Series events held in late February and early March, Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank, and Tom Ginsburg, faculty director of the University of Chicago’s Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression, spoke about effective leadership and academic freedom, respectively, and took questions from Columbia Law students.

The speaker series, hosted by Daniel Abebe, Dean and Lucy G. Moses Professor of Law, is part of the Law School’s broader commitment to free expression, academic excellence, and public engagement. By convening conversations with leading voices from law, government, academia, business, private practice, and civil society, the Law School community can gain valuable insight, explore novel ideas, and better understand law’s distinctive role in a rapidly changing world.

“I envisioned the Dean’s Distinguished Speaker Series as not only a platform to bring some of the most timely and influential voices to the Law School but also as a demonstration of our fundamental values as a Law School community,” the Dean explained at the March 2 event featuring Ginsburg. 

On Leadership and Trust

The series kicked off on February 19 when Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank, joined Dean Abebe for a wide-ranging conversation on her life and career in the private and public sectors. The two discussed topics such as how to be an effective leader in a crisis, Lagarde’s decision to enter public service after a successful career in private practice, and the need for a digital euro in the era of cryptocurrency.

That evening, Lagarde, who previously served as a senior French government official and the head of the International Monetary Fund, received the Wolfgang Friedmann Memorial Award from the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law at its annual banquet. 

In accepting the honor, she focused her remarks on rebuilding trust in the international legal and economic order by transforming it. “Everyone here understands the importance of trust,” she said. “For that reason, you will also understand why it is so alarming when trust between nations begins to erode.”

To strengthen the international order, Lagarde called for reforms to the World Trade Organization, questioned special developing-nation trade exemptions for China, and called for an increase in bilateral and regional trade agreements.  

“We face a choice,” said Lagarde at the award ceremony. “We can accept the drift towards a balance of power among rivals—a model that history tells us is stable only until it is not. Or we can take the harder route: reform so that the international order regains the trust of those who have lost faith in it.”

On Academic Freedom 

Free expression and open discourse are among the strategic priorities the Dean has outlined for the Law School. On March 2, Ginsburg explored these topics and more with a lecture on “The American Attack on Academic Freedom in Comparative Perspective.” 

In introductory remarks, Dean Abebe cited Columbia historian Richard Hofstadter’s belief that universities must be places in society where anything can be studied or questioned—a principle that is “all the more true for a law school,” the Dean said. “Respect for one another, for democratic norms, and for the rule of law are bedrock for everything that follows.” 

Ginsburg began his lecture by saying that the United States is in a period of what he called “the most severe attack or set of attacks on academic freedom” that it has ever experienced. 

Infringements on academic freedom may be caused by a number of factors, Ginsburg explained, including in some cases university reliance on government funding, pressure from major donors, and the threat of “cancel culture” from outside groups using social media. In addition, some states have passed “divisive concepts” legislation banning the teaching of particular topics—including those concerning race, gender, and even animal research—in public school and state university classrooms.  

University faculty members have faced career repercussions for social media posts, he said, but preserving liberty in “extramural speech” is “core to the American conception of free expression,” he said. “It means that for a faculty member, of course if I say something stupid on Twitter, I can be subjected to all the calumny and abuse that comes my way, but what I cannot be subjected to is being fired for it.”

To protect academic freedoms, Ginsburg called on those in the academy to recommit themselves to ideas of professionalism. “If we committed to all of you, the students in particular, that when you come here, you’re going to get an excellent, professionally delivered professional education free of ideology, helping you to learn how to think and not telling you what to think, we would do much better, I think,” he said. “And so I see the answer in returning to those core principles.”

Learn more about the Dean's Distinguished Speaker Series and upcoming events.