Events

5th Annual Commercial Speech and First Amendment VIRTUAL conference

The Fifth Annual Commercial Speech and the First Amendment Conference is ready for registration.  It is a virtual conference via Zoom, offering the opportunity to ask questions and engage with our panelists.  We look forward to your joining us.  We plan to take questions through the chat function on Zoom. We also plan to release the conference video of the event and will need all attendees to sign a release form. The form will be sent to registered attendees prior to the start of the conference.

Cancelled: FOIA Bootcamp

CANCELLED

As government becomes more opaque, it is ever more important to know how to use effectively the legal tools that exist to make federal, state, and local governments more open and accountable. To that end, the Media Freedom & Information Access Clinic (MFIA) and Floyd Abrams Institute for Freedom of Expression at Yale Law School are hosting their annual “FOIA bootcamp” on March 19, 2020, where attendees can learn from experts in the field how to make the most out of government transparency laws.

Brown Bag Lunch: EXPUNGEMENT AND THE PRESS: Should an enforceable right to be forgotten apply to the reporting of past entanglements with law enforcement?

The Abrams Institute for Freedom of Expression and the Media Freedom & Information Access Clinic at Yale Law School invite you, your journalist colleagues and others from your organization to the next in their series of occasional lunchtime discussions of current issues facing journalists and their lawyers.

Checks, Balances and the Trump Administration

The current Administration has been criticized for using executive orders and administrative actions to dismantle regulatory regimes without apparent regard for existing law or established fact, and doing so in ways that dodge the checks and balances of congressional and judicial oversight. This panel will assess how constitutional structures and historic practices intended to promote Executive Branch accountability are performing in an era of expansive executive power, fake news, and the Trump management style.

AAC 2019: Accountability in Partisan Times

This conference is made possible by the generous support of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Democracy Fund and Legal Clinics Fund.

Commercial Speech and the First Amendment

COMMERCIAL SPEECH POST-NIFLA  

From Yale Law School’s Abrams Institute for Freedom of Speech

COMMERCIAL SPEECH AND THE FIRST AMENDMENT

June 3, 2019 - 8:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.

New York, NY

Freedom of Expression Scholars Conference 7

The Floyd Abrams Institute for Freedom of Expression holds its seventh annual Freedom of Expression Scholars Conference (FESC) at Yale Law School in New Haven, Connecticut on April 26 & 27, 2019.    

Book Talk: Official Secrets and Oversight in the European Union, Vigjilenca Abazi and David Pozen

Official Secrets and Oversight in the European Union 

Does the governance of secrecy in the European Union impede its fundamental principles of democracy and fundamental rights? Based on her recent book, Dr Vigjilenca Abazi explains the shifts in institutional practice of oversight in the European Union that disproportionately favour secrecy creating serious limitations to open democratic deliberations and access to justice. Professor David Pozen (Columbia Law School), a leading scholar on government secrecy will discuss the book adding U.S. perspectives.     

Unmasking “Dark Money”— The Tangled Relationship between Compelled Donor Disclosure, Anonymous Speech, and the Reporters’ Privilege

This event will explore the potential implications for journalists and their confidential sources of ongoing efforts to compel the disclosure of sources of so-called “dark money” in candidate and issue campaigns. Is the push to unmask dark money a threat to anonymous speech in other contexts, and how might the legal standards developed in that context impact the relationships between reporters and their confidential sources?

A question and answer session for both journalists and lawyers will follow a discussion of the issues among:

Free Expression in an Age of Surveillance: Measuring the “Chilling Effect”

On Wednesday, Nov. 14, the Knight Institute and the Information Society Project at Yale Law School will host the second event in a series examining the role that the First Amendment should play in assessing the lawfulness of government surveillance. The panel, co-sponsored by the Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Columbia Journalism School, asks: Does surveillance chill speech and dissent? How so? And can we measure the chilling effect?