Julio Frenk condemns UCLA Law symposium featuring attorney of alleged 9/11 conspirator
Chancellor Julio Frenk is pictured. In a Friday statement, Frenk condemned a School of Law symposium that hosted a defense attorney who represented an alleged organizer of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. (Andrew Ramiro Diaz/Photo editor)
By Nicholas Mouchawar
Sept. 12, 2026 3:07 p.m.
Chancellor Julio Frenk on Friday condemned a School of Law symposium that included a defense attorney who represented an alleged organizer of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Melanie Partow, an attorney for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was invited to be a guest speaker at the symposium, which sought to examine how the United States’ response to the 9/11 attacks changed detention, immigration enforcement and government surveillance, according to the School of Law’s website. Mohammed is accused of helping plan the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, and he is currently in prison at Guantanamo Bay.
Mohammed also confessed to killing Daniel Pearl, a Jewish Wall Street Journal reporter, in Pakistan in 2002. Pearl’s father, UCLA computer science professor Judea Pearl, denounced the event in a Thursday X post.
Frenk said in a Friday statement that he understood why the event hurt Judea Pearl and others, praising the professor’s decades of work in combating antisemitism and terrorism. Judea Pearl did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the symposium.
“The brutal murder of Daniel Pearl was an act of unspeakable evil, and I support Judea and his family,” Frenk said in the statement.
He added that speaking at UCLA should not “be mistaken for the university’s approval.”
“UCLA’s values are clear. We reject antisemitism and terrorism in all their forms, and we believe our campus must be a place where the dignity of every member of our community is respected,” Frenk said in the statement. “Nothing about this event at the UCLA School of Law, which we do not endorse, changes or qualifies those commitments.”
Five law school centers and programs within the UCLA School of Law – the Critical Race Studies Program, International and Comparative Law Program, Institute for Technology, Law and Policy, Miñana Family Center for Immigration Law and Policy and Promise Institute for Human Rights – sponsored the event, according to the event’s website.
The School of Law and UCLA Media Relations did not immediately respond to requests for comment on whether Partow attended the event. Partow did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Frenk’s statement.
“Judea’s voice, and the history behind it, deserve to be heard with the seriousness and humanity they demand,” Frenk said.
