The right(s) stuff

Freedom of expression? Alec Greven, ’21, has a few thoughts on the subject. The University of Chicago Law School student has already worked extensively on that and other First Amendment issues as he pursues a career protecting individuals’ constitutional rights.

Greven credits Richmond professors Javier Hidalgo and Jessica Flanigan in the Jepson School of Leadership Studies for sparking his interest in the First Amendment and constitutional law. After taking Hidalgo’s first-year seminar Philosophy of Freedom, Greven wrote a Richmond College Student Government Association resolution that helped spark a review process. It resulted in the adoption of a university policy on free expression in his senior year.

“Flanigan created amazing practical opportunities for me to explore First Amendment issues more deeply,” Greven says. He and Flanigan co-authored a 2021 paper titled “Speech and Campus Inclusivity” that was published in Public Affairs Quarterly.

The Jepson Scholar attended University of Oxford for graduate school, earning a degree in public policy. “It was great to look at freedom of expression in an international context,” he says.

Upon returning to the U.S., he worked for a year as a research fellow at the Institute of Free Speech, writing 26 articles on freedom of expression issues. Greven is now relishing his studies at University of Chicago Law School, his “dream school” because of its faculty expertise on First Amendment issues. He’s had an article on First Amendment rights accepted by the Oklahoma Law Review. And this past summer, he interned at the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit public interest law firm that won both a First Amendment case and a Fifth Amendment case before the Supreme Court this year.

“It was amazing to work on such major cases,” he says, “and to realize the importance of public interest litigation — in taking on cases not because they’re lucrative, but because of principle.”