Kenneth Lawson v. University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, et al.

At a faculty meeting in February of 2023, University of Hawai’i at Manoa law professor Ken Lawson harshly criticized university leaders for holding a Black History Month panel with no black panelists, including law school dean Camille Nelson, whose understanding of the issue he questioned because, having been born and raised in Jamaica, she lacked direct experience with certain specifically American manifestations of racism. Following the meeting, Lawson organized a boycott of the event over email. 

After Nelson filed a complaint against Lawson with the law school, it suspended him and launched an investigation. That prompted Lawson to file a number of still-ongoing lawsuits against the university and Nelson, including one alleging his suspension violated the First Amendment. In early 2025, Nelson countersued Lawson for defamation in one of those cases. 

Upon review of that countersuit, a Hawai’i circuit court declined to dismiss Nelson’s claims under the state’s law providing protection from strategic lawsuits against public participation, i.e., the state’s “anti-SLAPP” statute. But in doing so, the court evaluated Nelson’s claims under a legal standard from public employee speech precedent, seemingly just because the parties happened to be a university dean and a professor, when it should have used the anti-SLAPP law’s general matter-of-public-concern standard. 

On September 2, 2026, along with local counsel William Harrison, FIRE filed an amicus brief with the Hawaii Intermediate Court of Appeals arguing Lawson's speech was core First Amendment-protected expression as commentary as a citizen on a matter of public concern—here, governance of public institutions. We accordingly urged the court to remand the case to the lower court to dismiss the defamation claims under Hawaii's anti-SLAPP law, which protects Lawson’s speech criticizing Nelson on a matter of public concern.