Amy L. Wax is Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania. A version of these remarks was delivered at the Encounter Books Gala on October 23, 2025, in Washington, DC, where she received the Jeane Kirkpatrick Prize for Academic Freedom.

I am greatly honored to be here at this gala with so many distinguished guests and to receive the Jean Kirkpatrick Prize for academic courage, and I want to thank Encounter Books and Roger Kimball for this wonderful award. I also thank others who have been with me on my journey as an academic dissident, now seven years long and counting. These include members of my family, my husband, Dr. Roger Cohen, an oncologist and Professor of Medicine at Penn, as well as my three children and their spouses and families, some of whom-Isaac Cohen and his wife Kerri Mullins-are here tonight. I must add, however, that my children have thanked me for not changing my name when I married. Let’s face it, mom, they say, it’s good that we don’t have the same last name as you. I am also especially grateful to Paul Levy, Penn Law alum and donor, to other donors, and the Academic Freedom Alliance and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Expression for their unwavering support. I have only a few minutes to speak to this distinguished audience, and I want to begin with a story. But before the story, a little background is in order. This year I have been suspended at half pay by my home institution, the University of Pennsylvania. Why? The Penn Faculty Senate identified my infraction as inequitably targeted disrespect-a completely made-up phrase. (This is the same Senate that has convened a faculty panel on viewpoint diversity next week, and you can guess who is not invited to participate-perhaps one of the few professors on campus who actually voted for Trump.) In disciplining me, the Faculty Senate cited a farrago-a dog’s breakfast-of my remarks in the media and at conferences, which they mostly distorted, and a handful of alleged statements to students, which are almost wholly fabricated. Although Penn described my suspension to the judge in my lawsuit against them as just a teaching sabbatical, Penn proceeded to take away my Penn ID, my office, my library privileges, access to Penn buildings, travel money, and all research funds-forever. That’s like no teaching sabbatical that ever was. But that’s just one instance of Penn’s mendacity and duplicity. I can state with confidence that, if places like Penn can treat conservative professors like me-and not just housebroken ones-as I am being treated, and with impunity, higher ed will never be reformed. And it is badly in need of reform. But back to my story. Not long after the penalty went into effect, one of my husband’s colleagues at Penn Med-a surgeon wearing a bow tie, and we know what that means-asked him a question none of his colleagues have ever asked, preferring to pretend I don’t exist: Hey, how is your wife doing these days? In a moment of inspiration-no exception for him-he replied, Well, she’s ok. It helps to be resilient . . . and it helps to be right. Now, as much as I was gratified by that answer, it immediately called to my mind an aphorism that all law students learn from Learned Hand, a distinguished and respected appeals court judge. He famously said that the spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right. So that raises a question: how can we be right, and fortified by our conviction of being right, and still maintain the spirit that is not too sure that it is right-how can we blend requisite certainty with appropriate uncertainty? Well, this is a hard exam question, but I’ll take a quick stab at some sort of answer. I think the answer is something like this: in order to create a society in which we are truly free to deal openly with debatable facts and issues, there are some convictions we must all hold firmly and must never compromise. First, as our wise founder James Madison recognized, in a free democracy there will always be what he called faction-groups and individuals with differing interests, ideas, opinions, and points of views. Disagreement and dissent will never go away. Today, the left has forgotten that-progressives think that if we are all properly educated and informed, not misinformed, somehow we will all agree. But that is false: we will not. So democracy rests on accepting and dealing with disagreement, with dissent. How should we do that? In my humble opinion, with the utmost restraint and tolerance, properly understood, both official and unofficial. Now, of course there are limits to tolerance when it comes to rank anti-social behavior-deviance or license or lawbreaking, or the nastier experiments in living. Tolerance, properly understood, means somehow living with our political opponents, respecting and accepting a loyal opposition-which can be criticized, harshly if necessary, but which should not be banished or punished or persecuted or violently targeted. And we need to revive the concept of grudging tolerance-which is deeply conservative. We must reject the simple-minded poles of celebration vs. prohibition into which our society today has regrettably fallen. There is an in-between, a vital one. I almost never agree with Ezra Klein, but in his testament to Charlie Kirk, he did get one thing right. He wrote: A taste for disagreement is a virtue in a democracy. Different viewpoints should not be seen as an existential threat, as they so often are today, but rather as our lifeblood-as central to our precious way of life. So disagreement is not just a virtue, it is a necessity, without which democracy is not even possible. And I might add that a real university, fit for purpose-discovering knowledge, seeking truth-is not possible either. But what does this mean in actual practice? In an iconic quote from his First Inaugural in 1861, to a deeply divided country, Lincoln said to and of his fellow citizens: We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. Affection today is perhaps a counsel of perfection. And even friendship may sometimes be a bridge too far for those with very different political views, although I personally don’t think it should be. At the very least, we should not ghost, shun, ostracize, or even, with few exceptions, fire those whose opinions we reject-and I have never done so, although some of these have been done repeatedly to me. And certainly, we should not assault our opponents. Political violence is never acceptable in a polity that claims to be democratic. As they say in kindergarten, Use your words. What I just said should be obvious, but it is not. Most of the world has not gotten this memo-they punish, torture, imprison, penalize, and kill their enemies. The internecine violence in Palestine today is a case in point, and it is not exceptional. No society that behaves this way will ever be a viable democracy. People don’t like to hear that, but it is so. Today, growing numbers of Americans accept political violence, and we have long had a cancel culture that punishes dissent in our universities, and in the workplace, and in society at large, and we have it still. Another vital component of tolerance, properly understood, is the firm rejection of what our Supreme Court has called the heckler’s veto. What is that?-it is the power of those who are upset, offended, or affronted by opinions or facts to curtail or even banish their expression. You will never hear lefties use that phrase, heckler’s veto, and you will never read it in the New York Times. The heckler’s veto has acquired new power through the clever extension of the harm principle-Mill’s idea that the regulation of speech is only justified to prevent injury to others. But by invoking a listener’s mental and psychological distress from the content of speech, the enemies of free expression have weaponized the harm principle and extended it to shut down objectionable ideas. This weapon is potent, it is powerful, it is hard to defeat. Are there not mental or emotional harms that seem plausible, and that even freedom lovers are willing to recognize? Jonathan Haidt claims that too much screen time stunts children. Others say that harsh parenting predisposes to mental illness. But what is different about current abuses of the harm principle is that they apply to a particular kind of distress-the mental upset that supposedly results from the exposure to unwelcome facts, ideas, and opinions. And even if these effects are somehow real-and that is debatable-they are certainly exaggerated. Our vital commitment to free expression means that we must disregard them. As Jay Cost at the American Enterprise Institute has recently argued, negative reactions to offensive opinions should not count as harms to be balanced against the rights of free expression. The freedom to express ideas-even very unpopular ones-must be virtually absolute. Without that commitment-call it a convention, if you will-free thought will quickly erode and will ultimately disappear. I want to address a question that I have often been asked during my journey as an academic dissident, which is this: why do you stay in the academy, why persist, why endure the slings and arrows of your school’s and colleagues’ contempt and name-calling and ostracism, why not just retire and ride off into the sunset? I am in my 70s, my kids are grown, why do I need this tsuris? Well, the answer is: I don’t. I can’t claim it’s fun or pleasant. But it is necessary. The answer for me is pretty simple: someone has to do it, and do it for the students. The students desperately need to hear a different voice, and for now I provide one. Why does that motivate me? I grew up in an observant Jewish family, and central to my parents’ understanding of their faith and identity was the concept of the covenant, the bris-the tie that binds past to present to future generations, with gratitude towards our ancestors for their precious gifts, bought with great sacrifice and travail, unearned and undeserved by us, and the forward-looking obligation to preserve, protect and defend that inheritance for our posterity. This never was far from their minds. When I started delving into conservative ideas, I read Edmund Burke with a shock of recognition, and discovered that he too valorized the concept of the covenant-of the vital moral connection between generations-among, as he put it, those who are dead, those who are living, and those who are yet to be born. He spoke of our debt towards the people who have come before, of what is due to those coming after us. He warned against committing waste on the inheritance . . . leaving to those who come after a ruin instead of a habitation. In remaining at Penn Law, I seek in my small way to fend off that ruin and preserve that habitation-to honor our great debt to the past by passing it on. That preservation of past greatness-as advocated by the Jewish bris and Edmund Burke’s covenant-is of course under ferocious attack in society today. And never more so than in the university. Needless to say, I strongly dissent, and I know there are students and citizens who do, too. And I hear from them-from students, parents, and citizens from all over the country. In closing, I would like to quote just a few lines from some notes that I have received very recently-one from a parent of a student, and one from a former student. An e-mail from the father of a student in my Conservative Thought class reads as follows: This is just a quick note to tell you how thankful I am for you. I am just an ordinary man living in a very small and poor town in the American South. That is where my son, John, who took your class last year, was raised. Your strength and your conservative teaching have affected John more than you could possibly know. He is a better man because of you, Professor Wax. Another is from a former student in my Conservative Thought class-one who told me that his leftie family, including his pastor father in Cincinnati, have shunned him for his political views. He writes: It is too difficult to put into words how grateful I am that you were my law professor. I never imagined that one class would have such a profound impact on my life. I learned that the rationalism of individuals cannot possibly know as much as the inherited wisdom of tradition can teach. I learned that culture shapes destinies far more than welfare checks ever could. I learned that there is no magic dirt and if we believe the Western way of life is worth preserving, then we have to be the ones to preserve it. And most importantly, I learned by example how to stay faithful to truth and stand up to the coercive powers that seek to suppress it. Your trials and tribulations at Penn Law at the hands of so-called compassionate progressives reminds me of Hamilton’s foreboding quote from Federalist No. 1: ‘A dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidding appearance of zeal for firmness and efficiency of government. History will teach us that the former has been found a much more certain road to despotism than the latter.’ Yes, indeed, history is teaching us this as we speak. Such trenchant insights-from our Founders, and from my students who honor them-as well as the accolades I have gratefully received from all of you tonight, are what keep me going. And I do plan to keep going to the best of my ability.

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