Freedom of academic speech (FAS): navigating academic freedom and free speech in Brazil and the U.S. toward a new framework for protecting scholars’ speech

• The Brazilian and the U.S. academic freedom frameworks provides lessons, gaps, and challenges for scholars’ speech protection; • Freedom of Academic Speech (FAS) is a new framework proposal for scholars’ speech protection driven by lessons and gaps from the three mentioned frameworks; • FAS comprehends academic speech as composed by three dimensions: disciplinary expertise speech, university governance speech, and public political speech; • Academic speech is defined by academic functions and contexts which they may occur, namely, teaching, researching, peer and institutional engagement, and public engagement; • FAS proposes the regulation of each academic speech dimension by different regulatory criteria, namely, academic standards, non-incitement to violence standard, and democratic values protection standard. Scholars' speech is increasingly under threat across the globe, with growing cases of criminal prosecution, institutional censorship, and legal restrictions, particularly in contexts of democratic backsliding driven by far-right governments. The lack of conceptual clarity and the absence or use of inadequate standards by legal scholarship and constitutional courts to address the relationship between academic freedom and free speech contribute to weakening the protection of scholars' speech. This article offers a summary discussion of theoretical accounts of academic freedom and a cross-national comparative legal analysis of the Brazilian and the U.S. frameworks for the protection of academic freedom, focusing on how scholars’ speech is (un)protected. Highlighting lessons from scholarship and strengths, gaps, and challenges from the two national models, I propose a new framework for the protection of scholars’ speech, which I call Freedom of Academic Speech (FAS) framework. Grounded in the premise that scholars’ speech should be protected when exercised within professional duties, state or institutional sanctions should be limited to instances where a scholar’s conduct demonstrably violates their disciplinary expertise to fulfil academic functions, not their political views. I argue that academic speech spans three key dimensions: (1) disciplinary expertise speech, (2) university governance speech, and (3) public political speech. These are examined through the academic functions of teaching, research, institutional participation, and public engagement. The article concludes by outlining specific regulatory criteria for each of the three dimensions of academic speech to ensure a more robust and nuanced protection of scholars’ speech.