UCLA School of Law is scheduled to host a two-day symposium this week examining the legal legacy of the September 11 attacks, and its guest list has become a flashpoint. The event, titled “25 Years After 9/11: Reimagining Freedom, Justice, and Security,” is set for Thursday and Friday. 9/11 first responders and victims' family members have criticized the university, saying its focus on the attacks' aftermath treats an ongoing human tragedy as an academic abstraction.
The symposium, held in Room 1347 of the law school, was scheduled for September 10 and 11, 2026, and co-sponsored by five campus entities: the Critical Race Studies Program, the International & Comparative Law Program, the Institute for Technology, Law & Policy, the Miñana Family Center for Immigration Law & Policy, and the Promise Institute for Human Rights, according to UCLA Law. The event was also accredited by the State Bar of California to offer Minimum Continuing Legal Education credit to attending attorneys, per the same UCLA Law event page. Its official program structured panels around examining post-9/11 “security state” policies, including border militarization, mass surveillance, extraordinary rendition, torture, and expanding immigration detention regimes.
What surveillance authority remains?
One post-9/11 authority relevant to the symposium's focus on surveillance is Section 702. According to the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, the provision permits the attorney general and the director of national intelligence to jointly authorize foreign-intelligence collection targeting only non-U.S. persons reasonably believed to be outside the United States. The board's 2023 review identified queries involving U.S. persons as among Section 702's most serious privacy and civil-liberties concerns, noting that such queries generally did not require a showing of suspicion or approval from an outside judicial authority.
A Defense Attorney's Presence Raises Questions
Among the scheduled panelists was Melanie T. Partow, a trial attorney with the Military Commissions Defense Organization who represents Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the man federal courts have identified as the accused mastermind behind the September 11 attacks, in ongoing military commission proceedings at Guantanamo Bay, according to a July 2025 filing from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Those same federal filings note that 2,976 people were killed in the September 11, 2001 attacks, a toll that led directly to the establishment of the Guantanamo military commissions where Partow now practices. As reported by The National News Desk, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed himself was described in coverage of the event as an Islamist militant, and his connection to a panelist speaking at a university symposium became a central point of objection for critics.
Jim McCaffrey, a former FDNY lieutenant who responded to the Twin Towers attacks, called the event “absolutely absurd.” He said organizers were effectively pointing fingers at victims and portraying those attacked as the bad guys. His reaction reflects a broader frustration among first responders who feel that academic critiques of the post-9/11 security apparatus can minimize what happened to the people killed that day.
A Scholar's Past Words Resurface
Much of the outrage has centered on Yale Law professor Aslı Ü. Bâli, who also spoke at the symposium. Before joining Yale as the Howard M. Holtzmann Professor of Law, Bâli spent years at UCLA, where she served as the founding faculty director of the Promise Institute for Human Rights and director of the Center for Near Eastern Studies, according to the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. That long institutional relationship helps explain her prominent role in organizing and speaking at the UCLA event.
In a July 2020 essay published in Just Security titled “Defund America's Endless Wars,” Bâli wrote that counterterrorism serves as a kind of racist gravy train, and argued that law enforcement across the board has a direct funding incentive to characterize minority communities and dissidents as threat incubators. The essay appeared amid that summer's national debate over police funding, and its language has now resurfaced as critics scrutinize the panelists tied to the UCLA symposium.
Victims' Families Push Back
Sally Regenhard, who founded the Skyscraper Safety Campaign in December 2001, has spent nearly a quarter century advocating for building safety and firefighter protections after her son was killed at Ground Zero. Her son, Christian Michael Otto Regenhard, was a 28-year-old probationary firefighter with the FDNY when he died on September 11, 2001, according to testimony preserved by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. Regenhard criticized the symposium and Bâli's past remarks, asking, “Can't 9/11 families get a break?”
The event's roster also included Council on American-Islamic Relations California Executive Director Hussam Ayloush and University of Minnesota law professor Amna Akbar, according to the Washington Free Beacon. That same outlet noted that UCLA Law's Critical Race Studies Program, the symposium's lead sponsor, was established in 2000 as the first formal law school program in the country dedicated to critical race scholarship and legal theory.
Two Framings, One Anniversary
UCLA's event reflects an academic effort to examine how emergency counterterrorism laws, surveillance practices, military commissions, and civil-liberties restrictions have expanded state power over the past 25 years. But for McCaffrey and Regenhard, that framing sits uneasily alongside the raw grief still carried by first responders and family members who lost loved ones in the attacks. The symposium's mix of legal scholarship and personal loss highlights a divide that remains unresolved as the 25th anniversary approaches.
