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Event Details

November 12-13, 2026 
����̽�� Campus 
3050 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90010

Call for Papers

Now accepting submissions!  
Abstract deadline July 15, 2026 
Papers due November 1, 2026  
AIRFARE AND HOTEL PROVIDED* 
Submit an abstract (1500-word maximum) AND current CV to JIMEL@swlaw.edu

Concept Statement: 

Free speech anchors democratic self-governance and academic inquiry. Constitutional and human rights instruments—the U.S. First Amendment, Article 19 of the ICCPR, Article 10 of the ECHR—were designed to shield dissent and to keep ideas in circulation. In the Digital Age, however, technology, social dynamics, and market pressures have combined to discourage people from voicing what they actually believe, online and off. The chilling effect this produces is not a stray byproduct of legal doctrine. It is the predictable result of how power is distributed across law, markets, and culture, which together set the cost of expression.

Although it is invoked frequently in free speech doctrine, the chilling effect remains under-theorized as an indirect consequence of restrictions on expression. Analysis through the lenses of power dynamics may add clarity to the concept. Legal power operates through substantive rules such as defamation, privacy, and incitement, but it operates equally through procedural machinery: SLAPP suits, burdens of proof, the cost of competent counsel, prosecutorial discretion. Sanctions remain credible through these collateral consequences even when they are rarely imposed. Economic power shapes speech by tying visibility, livelihood, and access to concentrated platforms, employers, funders, and gatekeepers; dependence within precarious labor and attention markets raises the severity of potential sanctions. Cultural power governs through reputational economies and status hierarchies. The informal sanction of stigma and gatekeeping sometimes substitutes for legal punishment and sometimes amplifies it. These three forms of power do not operate in isolation. Legal rules ratify market arrangements; market incentives amplify cultural frames; cultural legitimacy determines which legal threats become most potent.

The chilling effect is thus often produced by non-legal norms that emerge through ordinary social life. Members of society shape and enforce these norms, and they tend to determine what can be said in public more quickly and more effectively than legal rules do—particularly online, outside the full reach of content moderation. Recent years have surfaced these dynamics through Black Lives Matter, MeToo, the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk assassination, and the broader phenomenon free speech advocates have come to call "cancel culture." The pertinent question is not whether to permit more or less speech in the abstract. It is how to arrange legal, economic, and cultural power so that chilling deters genuinely harmful expression while preserving space for thoughtful dissent and principled advocacy.

The contours of the chilling effect are not finely constructed. While the chilling effect is typically associated with speech regulation, it can arise in connection with almost any type of expressive restriction impelled by legal, economic or cultural power. In the entertainment industry, for example, expression is chilled by the multivalent power of intellectual property laws, including copyright, trademark, and rights of publicity. Those who control intellectual property rights have an expressive power that acts as a chilling effect on others, including fans. At the same time, content creators would lose their incentive to invest in the development of their licensed characters if they could not prevent copycats, including AI enthusiasts, from competing—an economic chill that is largely kept at bay by intellectual property protections.

Social media generates a particularly common form of chilling, arising from communication between users. Digital reproduction multiplies audiences and extends the lifespan of any utterance well beyond what traditional social spheres would permit. A post written for a seminar cohort or professional network can be scraped, cross-posted, and decontextualized without the author's knowledge. Doxing, harassment, and organized brigading produce a threat environment that operates across time as well as space: posts can trigger immediate punishment, and they can resurface years later to derail academic admissions, scholarships, and employment opportunities. Young people bear the brunt of this. Adolescence has historically been a protected space for error and growth; it now occurs under conditions of permanent recordation. The implicit message to young adults is that mistakes, controversial experiments, and public stands all carry long-term reputational and economic risk—a message that chills thoughtful dissent and principled advocacy alongside whatever reckless speech it was meant to deter.

Groupthink, peer pressure, and the desire for acceptance push individuals toward chilled expression. Online communities tend to reward identity signaling and penalize deviation from viewpoint orthodoxy, while content moderation rules, community norms, and reputational feedback loops make conformity safer than candor. The phenomenon is not confined to homogeneous groups. Even diverse networks exhibit herding behavior when algorithms preferentially surface content that mirrors prior preferences or maximizes outrage. In such

environments, the "marketplace of ideas" metaphor begins to strain: speech is triaged by attention mechanisms and policed by informal sanction rather than debated on its merits.

Economic incentives at the platform level produce an attention economy that amplifies content according to engagement metrics rather than deliberative value. In the process, users become identifiable data subjects whose expressive behavior is aggregated into profiles that influence credit decisions, employment screening, insurance pricing, and public reputation. These systems are opaque and far-reaching, which generates a rational fear that experimentation with controversial ideas may be misinterpreted, stripped of context, or algorithmically associated with stigmatized communities or beliefs. Aggressive regulation can compound the problem by incentivizing over-removal—sometimes termed collateral censorship—where platforms suppress lawful but controversial speech to avoid liability. What emerges is a patchwork of public and private regulation that defines the limits of acceptable discourse and tends to flatten online debate toward the lowest common denominator. Legal power (statutory obligations, liability regimes, enforcement risk) interacts with economic power (platform business models, advertiser pressure, market consequences) and cultural power (normative expectations, reputational sanctions) to draw shifting limits around what people are willing to say. The prospect of disproportionate and unreviewable penalties deters legitimate expression, particularly on complex or evolving issues where positions are still being worked out.

According to the overview above, the symposium aims to address this power-sensitive analytical framework and explore normative possibilities through three broad sub‑issues:

1) Theoretical foundations of the chilling effect as a power ecology

Papers would conceptualize chilling as a function of legal, economic, and cultural power that jointly determines the expected costs of expression and their unequal distribution.

2) Chilling caused by legal rules and its interaction with economic and cultural power

Papers would analyze how doctrine (defamation, privacy, incitement, copyright, intermediary liability), procedures (SLAPPs, “lawfare,” enforcement discretion), and regulatory design interact with platform economics and social norms to produce collateral censorship and ambient deterrence.

3) Chilling caused by societal norms and market structures—and their relationship to law

Papers would examine how reputational economies, status hierarchies, and community governance translate into economic and professional consequences, and how legal frameworks can mitigate, legitimate, or magnify those effects.

Submit an Abstract (1500-word maximum) and current CV to jimel@swlaw.edu by July 15, 2026. 

*For authors with a completed manuscript who accept JIMEL’s written offer of publication, the Conference will defray the costs of pre-approved roundtrip flights originating in North America or from international points of origin and two nights’ room and tax at the designated “Conference Hotel” in Los Angeles. 

The full reimbursement policy can be found at www.swlaw.edu/JIMELReimbursement. 

JIMEL’s submission requirements can be found at www.swlaw.edu/jimelsubmissions. 

Scholars not completing a manuscript or not accepting JIMEL’s publication offer may travel to Los Angeles to present their accepted paper at their own expense. Some participants may have the option to participate in the conference remotely. ����̽�� reserves the right to move the Conference date or to transition it to an online-only event.