Bios | Yale Law School

AAC Bios

Friday Panels

What the Current Moment has Taught about Transparency

Welcome

Floyd Abrams is a Visiting Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School and partner in the law firm Cahill, Gordon & Reindel in New York where he practices in the areas of intellectual property, litigation and media. He has a national trial and appellate practice and has argued frequently in front of the Supreme Court. A graduate of Yale Law School and Cornell University, Mr. Abrams is also a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Panel 1: FOIA Successes and Failures

Charles Crain is a Clinical Lecturer in Law; Associate Research Scholar in Law; and Abrams Fellow, Information Society Project, at Yale Law School. He is a supervising attorney in the law school’s Media Freedom & Information Access Clinic. Prior to his legal career, Crain covered the war in Iraq as a freelance journalist. He received his J.D. from University of California, Berkeley, where he was a member of the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic. He received an M.S. in Journalism from Northwestern University and a B.A. in political science from University of Chicago.

Beryl Lipton is the Projects Editor and Senior Reporter at MuckRock. She has led projects on public records and government transparency, particularly as they relate to prisons, policing, and government's use of algorithms.

Christine Monahan is Counsel at American Oversight, a non-partisan, nonprofit ethics watchdog organization primarily engaged in Freedom of Information Act litigation. Prior to joining American Oversight, Monahan practiced law at Mehri & Skalet, PLLC, where she represented consumers, non-profits, and union health and welfare funds in judicial and regulatory proceedings. She clerked for the Honorable Judith W. Rogers of the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Monahan received her law degree from Yale Law School. Before law school, Monahan worked as a Senior Health Policy Analyst at Georgetown University’s Center on Health Insurance Reforms and as a Health Policy Advisor for the National Partnership for Women & Families.

Gunita Singh is the 2020/2021 Jack Nelson/Dow Jones Foundation Legal Fellow for the Reporters Committee where she works on litigation, policy, and amicus work, primarily around state and federal freedom of information laws, while also helping reporters and news organizations with public records requests. Gunita received her J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center. She earned her undergraduate degree at Boston University where she studied political science and graduated magna cum laude. Gunita was previously the staff attorney at the government transparency organization Property of the People where she used the Freedom of Information Act to acquire thousands of records on matters of public concern in an effort to foster transparency and accountability. She grew up in Palo Alto, California.

Cortelyou C. Kenney is the Associate Director of Cornell Law School’s First Amendment Clinic and a Visiting Assistant Clinical Professor at the Law School. She is also a Visiting Fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. Prior to her appointment at Cornell, Ms. Kenney served as a Research Scholar in Law and Staff Attorney at the Collaboration for Research Integrity and Transparency at Yale Law School and a Supervising Attorney and Clinical Lecturer-in-Law at Yale Law School’s Media Freedom & Information Access Clinic. She has also served as a Thomas C. Grey Fellow at Stanford Law School, worked at the National Women’s Law Center, and served as an associate at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Dorr LLP. She clerked for Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum on the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York and then-Judge Roger L. Gregory of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. She is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley School of Law and of Dartmouth College.

Panel 2: Zoom Justice and the Future of Court Access

Kelli Sager is a partner at Davis Wright Tremaine. She has more than 35 years of litigation experience representing television and radio broadcasters, cable companies, motion picture producers and distributors, newspapers and magazines, book authors, Internet companies, and Web publishers, both at the trial and appellate level of federal and state courts. Her practice encompasses all areas of media and entertainment litigation, including access, defamation, privacy, idea submission claims, prior restraint, reporter's shield laws, copyright and trademark law, and Internet law. She has represented media clients in many high-profile trials, including the O.J. Simpson murder trial, and serves on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Ad Hoc Committee on Cameras in the Courtroom.

Hon. Ronnie Abrams is a District Judge in the Southern District of New York. She received a B.A. from Cornell University in 1990 and a J.D. from Yale Law School in 1993. Upon graduation, she served as a law clerk for the Honorable Thomas P. Griesa of the Southern District of New York.

Judge Abrams served as a federal prosecutor in the United States Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York from 1998 to 2008, holding the positions of Chief of the General Crimes Unit and Deputy Chief of the Criminal Division. While at the U.S. Attorney's Office, Judge Abrams received several awards and commendations for her work, including the Department of Justice Director's Award for Superior Performance as a Federal Prosecutor. From 2008 until the time of her judicial appointment, Judge Abrams served as Special Counsel for Pro Bono at Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP, where she had previously worked as a litigation associate. She was also an Adjunct Professor at Columbia Law School, where she taught a course on investigating and prosecuting federal criminal cases.

From 2009 until she joined the bench in 2012, Judge Abrams served as Counsel to the New York State Justice Task Force, one of the first permanent task forces to address wrongful convictions in the United States. She received the New York State Bar Association President's Pro Bono Service Award for her Justice Task Force work. In 2015, Judge Abrams helped create and has since run the “Young Adult Opportunity Program” a judicially supervised pretrial diversion program for non-violent young adults in the Southern District. She has also been involved with other criminal justice reform efforts, including the creation of reentry courts. Judge Abrams presently heads the Southern District’s Media Access Committee.

Locke E. Bowman is the Executive Director of the MacArthur Justice Center. Since 1992, he has served as the driving force in defining the mission, shaping the docket and growing the footprint of the organization. One of Chicago’s most prominent civil rights attorneys, he has a long track record litigating cases about individual and systemic injustice. Bowman has won over $100 million in settlements and verdicts for victims of police misconduct and wrongful conviction. He also serves as a Clinical Professor at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law. He has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the American Constitution Society’s Chicago Legal Legend Award; the First Defender Award and the Rev. Willie Baker Award for his work in bringing Jon Burge and his men to justice; the Clarence Darrow Award for his advocacy in support of Illinois’ death penalty moratorium; and the IVI/IPO Legal Eagle Award, for helping to expose Chicago Police corruption. Prior to joining the MacArthur Justice Center, Mr. Bowman was a criminal defense lawyer at Silets & Martin. He also worked as an assistant corporation counsel for the City of Chicago, was an associate at Mayer, Brown & Platt and served as a law clerk to Judge Hubert L. Will of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.

Lauren Kirchner is an investigative reporter at The Markup. She writes about the intersection between government and technology and how the use of data in decisions affects us all, particularly the most vulnerable. She previously worked at ProPublica, where she was part of the team of reporters and programmers who were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting for their “Machine Bias” series. Her reporting on technology and criminal justice has appeared in The New York Times, Columbia Journalism Review, and Pacific Standard magazine, among others. Lauren began her journalism career at the Richmond Times-Dispatch in Virginia.

Hon. Emily Miskel has served as judge of the 470th district court of Collin County, Texas, since the court was created in 2015. During the pandemic, she has been a leader in virtual trials. In May, she held the country's first remote jury trial. Judge Miskel received her law degree from Harvard Law School and is board certified in family law by the Texas Board of Legal Specialization. She graduated from Stanford University in the top 15% of her class with a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering. She frequently speaks on legal technology topics such as electronic evidence, e-discovery, data theft, interception of communications, and online impersonation. Judge Miskel serves on the Texas Judicial Council, the policy-making body for the state judiciary. She also serves on the Pattern Jury Charge Oversight Committee and the Computer & Technology Law Council for the State Bar of Texas. She is the 2020 recipient of the William H. Rehnquist Award for Judicial Excellence by the National Center for State Courts.

Sonja R. West joined the University of Georgia School of Law in the fall of 2006 and is the holder of the Otis Brumby Distinguished Professorship in First Amendment Law, a post shared by the law school and Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication. She specializes in constitutional law, media law and the U.S. Supreme Court. Prior to joining the School of Law faculty, West taught as the Hugo Black Faculty Fellow at the University of Alabama School of Law. She has also served as a judicial clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens and Judge Dorothy W. Nelson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Her other professional experience includes several years as an associate attorney for the Los Angeles law firms Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher and Davis Wright Tremaine, where she represented media clients on a variety of First Amendment and intellectual property issues at the trial and appellate levels. In recognition of her scholarship, West was awarded the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication’s 2017 Harry W. Stonecipher Award for Distinguished Research on Media Law and Policy and the National Communication Association’s 2016 Franklyn S. Haiman Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Freedom of Expression. Her work has been published in numerous law reviews and journals including the Harvard Law Review, the California Law Review, the UCLA Law Review, the Michigan Law Review and the Northwestern Law Review. West also has authored articles about legal issues and the U.S. Supreme Court for Slate, CNN, Washington Monthlyand The Huffington Post. She is a frequent commentator for various news media outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The National Law Journal, Reuters, MSNBC’s "The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell," Bloomberg News, The Guardian, The Boston Globe, National Public Radio and Public Radio International. Having earned a B.A. in journalism and communication studies with honors and distinction from the University of Iowa, West worked as a reporter in Illinois, Iowa, and Washington, D.C., before entering law school. She graduated with high honors from the University of Chicago Law School, where she served as executive editor of The University of Chicago Law Review and was inducted into the Order of the Coif.

Panel 3: Newsgathering in Troubled Times

Lee Levine is Senior Counsel at BallardSpahr. He has represented media clients in libel, invasion of privacy, reporter's privilege, access, copyright, and related First Amendment cases for more than 35 years. In the U.S. Supreme Court, he has argued for the media defendants in Harte-Hanks Communications, Inc. v. Connaughton and Bartnicki v. Vopper. Lee also has litigated in the courts of more than 20 states and the District of Columbia, and has appeared in most federal appeals courts and in the highest courts of 10 states. Lee served as an Adjunct Professor of Law at the Georgetown University Law Center from 1989 to 2016. He is the lead author of the treatise Newsgathering and the Law, now in its fourth edition; he co-authored the casebook Media and the Law, now in its second edition; and most recently, together with Professor Stephen Wermiel, he co-authored The Progeny: Justice William J. Brennan’s Fight to Preserve the Legacy of New York Times v. Sullivan, published by the American Bar Association Press to commemorate the 50th anniversary of that landmark decision. Chambers USA has reported that Lee is considered "the greatest First Amendment attorney in the United States" and has ranked him nationally as a "star individual" and, most recently, a "senior statesman," in First Amendment litigation. Likewise, The Legal 500 US has written that Lee's "reputation is unparalleled. He is in a class of his own." And, in Best Lawyers, Lee has been described as "the dean of First Amendment Law." Lee was one of the founding attorneys of the highly regarded First Amendment boutique law firm Levine Sullivan Koch & Schulz in 1997, which merged with Ballard Spahr in October 2017.

RonNell Andersen Jones is an Affiliated Fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project and the Lee E. Teitelbaum Chair and Professor of Law at the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law. A former newspaper reporter and editor, Professor Jones is a First Amendment scholar who teaches, researches and writes on legal issues affecting the press and on the intersection between media and the courts, with a particular emphasis on the United States Supreme Court. Her scholarship addresses issues of press access and transparency and the role of the press as a check on government. She is also a widely cited national expert on reporter’s privilege and newsgathering rights and a regular speaker on emerging areas of social media law. Her scholarly work has appeared in numerous books and journals, including Michigan Law Review, Northwestern Law Review, UCLA Law Review, Washington University Law Review, and the Harvard Law Review Forum. She is also a regular public commentator on press freedom issues. Her op-eds have been published in several major news outlets, including CNN and The New York Times, and her research has been quoted in Newsweek, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and other national publications. Professor Jones graduated first in her law school class and clerked for the Honorable William A. Fletcher on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor on the United States Supreme Court. Prior to entering academia, she was an attorney in the Issues & Appeals section of Jones Day, where her work focused on Supreme Court litigation and included major constitutional cases.

David S. Bralow is the Legal Director of the Press Freedom Defense Fund, bringing a wealth of experience in media law including First Amendment expertise, national security issues, FOIA prosecutions and appeals, defamation, and privacy. Prior to joining First Look Media, Bralow was of counsel in the Media, Communication and Entertainment Practice Group of Pepper Hamilton LLP. He also served as Senior Vice President and General Counsel at Digital First Media, a multi-platform media company with the second largest newspaper circulation in the United States; and as Assistant General Counsel for 13 years at the Tribune Company, where he provided legal advice to their newspapers, websites and television stations.

Alan Chen is a leading national expert in free speech doctrine and theory, the law of federal courts, and public interest law. He is the co-author of two books, Public Interest Lawyering: A Contemporary Perspective (Wolters Kluwer Law & Business 2013) and Free Speech Beyond Words: The Surprising Reach of the First Amendment (NYU Press 2017). He has also written numerous scholarly articles, and his work has been published in many of the leading national law journals, including the Columbia Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Vanderbilt Law Review, and Iowa Law Review. Since joining the Sturm College of Law faculty in 1992, Chen has received several awards for his teaching, contributions to the law review, and pro bono legal work. Although he is a full-time academic, Professor Chen continues to carry an active litigation docket and represents the plaintiffs in many high-profile civil rights cases in federal courts around the country, including constitutional challenges to police use of pepper spray on peaceful protestors in California, the State of Oklahoma's botched lethal injection execution of Clayton Lockett, 'Ag-Gag' laws in Idaho and Utah that punish undercover investigators and journalists, and Colorado's mandatory Pledge of Allegiance law. Before entering teaching, Chen was a staff attorney with the ACLU's Chicago office, where he was a civil liberties litigator focusing primarily on cases concerning the First Amendment, police misconduct, and privacy rights. Before that, he served as a law clerk to the Honorable Marvin E. Aspen, U.S. District Court judge for the Northern District of Illinois.

Kelly Simon has been the Interim Legal Director at the ACLU of Oregon since September 2019. In her current role, Kelly has shaped, directed and managed the organization’s strategic advocacy and litigation efforts on a broad variety civil liberties issues, including the organization’s 7 currently active cases defending the rights of journalists, legal observers, protesters, medics and others present at protests.

Wendi C. Thomas is the editor and publisher of MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, a nonprofit newsroom focused on poverty, power and public policy. She is also part of ProPublica’s 2020 Local Reporting Network. Previously Thomas was metro columnist and assistant managing editor at The (Memphis) Commercial Appeal. She’s also worked for The Charlotte Observer, The (Nashville) Tennessean and The Indianapolis Star. A 2016 Nieman fellow at Harvard University. She is the 2020 Selden Ring Award winner for investigative reporting and won first place in the Association of Health Care Journalists’ 2019 awards for business reporting. Her “Profiting from the Poor” investigation tied for first place in the Investigative Reporters & Editors 2019 print/online award. In 2019, Thomas received the National Association of Black Journalists’ Best Practices award. In 2018, she was named Journalist of the Year by Journalism and Women Symposium. She’s a graduate of Butler University and a proud product of public schools.

Panel 4: Law Enforcement Accountability

Jonathan Manes leads the MacArthur Justice Center’s work on voting rights at Northwestern University. He also litigates civil rights and government transparency cases challenging police practices, novel technologies, and national security policies. Over more than a decade of practice and teaching, Manes has worked to hold government accountable and defend the rights of immigrants, prisoners, victims of police abuse, and investigative journalists. At the MacArthur Justice Center he is working to protect the voting rights of people entangled in the criminal justice system, including those who are incarcerated in jails on election day. Before coming to the MacArthur Justice Center, Manes was the founder and faculty director of the Civil Liberties & Transparency Clinic at the University at Buffalo. There, he won victories for local activists exposing a pattern of concealed suicide attempts at county jails and for millions of veterans whose private data was left unprotected by the Department of Defense, among others. He previously worked as a supervising attorney at Yale Law School’s Media Freedom & Information Access Clinic representing journalists and non-profits in First Amendment and transparency lawsuits. Earlier in his career, as a Gibbons Fellow, he won an important appellate victory establishing the First Amendment right to record police officers on the streets, and he developed successful litigation challenging the discriminatory surveillance of Muslim communities by the NYPD. He began his legal career as a fellow in the ACLU’s National Security Project. Manes has published widely on the conflict between secrecy and democratic accountability, especially with respect to novel surveillance technologies and national security. His work has appeared in the Georgetown Law Journal, Berkeley Technology Law Journal, and Yale Law Journal Forum. Manes is a board member of the New York Civil Liberties Union and serves on the steering committee of the Free Expression Legal Network. He clerked for Justice Morris J. Fish of the Supreme Court of Canada. He graduated from Yale Law School, the London School of Economics (M.Sc. Philosophy of the Social Sciences), and Columbia University (B.A. Biochemistry; Philosophy of Science).

Monica Bell is an Associate Professor of Law at Yale Law School and an Associate Professor of Sociology at Yale University. Her areas of research include law and sociology, law and inequality, policing and the criminal legal system, welfare and public benefits law, housing law and residential segregation, and race and the law. Her scholarship has appeared in the Yale Law Journal, American Journal of Sociology, NYU Law Review, Law & Society Review, Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, and other journals. She has also published writing in popular outlets such as the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Washington Post, and The Appeal.

Marbre Stahly-Butts is the Executive Director of Law4BlackLives. She works closely with organizers and communities across the country to advance and actualize radical policy. She currently serves on the Leadership Team of the Movement For Black Lives Policy Table and helped develop the Vision for Black Lives Policy Platform. Since graduating from Yale Law School four years Marbre has supported local and national organizations from across the country in their policy development and advocacy. She joined the Center for Popular Democracy as a Soros Justice Fellow in Fall 2013. Her Soros Justice work focused on organizing and working with families affected by aggressive policing and criminal justice policies in New York City in order to develop meaningful bottom up policy reforms. While in law school, Marbre focused on the intersection of criminal justice and civil rights and gained legal experience with the Bronx Defenders, the Equal Justice Initiative and the Prison Policy Initiative. Before law school Marbre received her Masters in African Studies from Oxford University and worked in Zimbabwe organizing communities impacted by violence and then in South Africa teaching at Nelson Mandela’s alma mater. Marbre graduated from Columbia University, with a BA in African-American History and Human Rights.

Jamiles Lartey is a New Orleans-based staff writer for the Marshall Project. Previously, he worked as a reporter for the Guardian covering issues of criminal justice, race and policing. Jamiles was a member of the team behind the award-winning online database “The Counted,” tracking police violence in 2015 and 2016. In 2016, He was named “Michael J. Feeney Emerging Journalist of the Year” by the National Association of Black Journalists. In his off time, Jamiles is an avid drummer, playing and recording with artists in the New Orleans area.

Emanuel Powell is a Skadden Fellow and Staff Attorney at ArchCity Defenders, a nonprofit civil rights law firm in St. Louis, Missouri providing holistic legal advocacy to combat the criminalization of poverty and state violence against poor people and people of color. Emanuel’s cousin, Ronnie Shorter, was killed by five officers of the Greenville, Mississippi Police Department on January 21, 2017. In honor of his life and the countless lives of others killed by the state, Emanuel’s work focuses on supporting surviving families like his through a combination of legal advocacy, grassroots organizing, media and policy advocacy, and social service support. His primary focus is litigating cases on behalf of surviving families to ensure access to public records relating to the killings and in-custody deaths of their loved ones. Emanuel’s article discussing this work, Unlawful Silence: St. Louis Families' Fight for Records After the Killing of a Loved One by Police, was published by Georgetown Law’s American Criminal Law Review Online in Spring 2020.

Emanuel is a native of Liberty and Greenville, Mississippi. He earned his bachelor’s degree in business administration from the University of Southern California, with a concentration in international finance, and law degree from Harvard Law School. Prior to joining ArchCity, Emanuel served as a judicial law clerk to the Honorable Carlton W. Reeves, U.S. District Judge for the Southern District of Mississippi.

Samuel Sinyangwe is an American policy analyst and racial justice activist. Sinyangwe is a member of the Movement for Black Lives and a co-founder of We the Protestors, a group of digital tools that include Mapping Police Violence, a database of police killings in the U.S. and Campaign Zero, a policy platform to end police violence. Sinyangwe is a co-host of the Pod Save the People podcast, where he discusses the week's news with a panel of other activists. Sam is data scientist who leads the development of research, digital tools and platforms to end police violence and systemic racism in America. Sam works with organizers across the country to use data to hold local police departments accountable and change the laws and policies that structure police behavior. Previously, Sam worked at PolicyLink to support a national network of 61 Promise Neighborhoods communities to build cradle-to-career systems of support for low-income families. He also worked with city leaders, youth activists and community organizations develop comprehensive agendas to achieve quality education, health, and justice for young black men. He has been named one of the Forbes 30 Under 30 and The Root 100. Sam grew up in Orlando, FL, and has been involved in organizing and advocacy since he was in high school. He graduated from Stanford University in 2012, where he studied how race and racism impact the U.S. political system.

Panel 5: Surveillance and Security

Catherine Crump is an Clinical Professor of Law at UC Berkeley, School of Law, where she directs the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic. Her advocacy and research focus on the impact of new technologies on civil liberties and the justice system. Crump’s civil liberties advocacy focuses on uncovering information about how law enforcement agencies deploy surveillance technology and promoting expansive protections for privacy and free speech in the face of increasingly advanced technologies. Crump’s work also examines how technology is reshaping the justice system, from the investigative phase through trial to post-conviction supervision. Crump has litigated cases on behalf of clients in numerous federal district and appellate courts and in the California Supreme Court. She has also testified before Congress, the European Parliament, and various state legislatures and municipal bodies. She appears regularly in the news media, and her TED talk on automatic license plate readers has been viewed nearly 2 million times. Crump’s scholarly agenda examines deployments of surveillance technology on the ground by state and local justice agencies. She seeks to harness the details of how surveillance is governed and deployed to inform broader theoretical debates about surveillance, liberty, and democratic accountability. Her article, Surveillance Policy Making by Procurement, appeared in the Washington Law Review. Her article Tracking the Trackers: An Examination of Electronic Monitoring of Youth in Practice, was published by the UC Davis Law Review. Prior to joining the Berkeley Law faculty, Crump spent nearly nine years at the American Civil Liberties Union. Before that, she clerked for Judge M. Margaret McKeown of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. She is a graduate of Stanford University and Stanford Law School.

Hannah Bloch-Wehba is an Associate Professor of Law at Texas A&M University School of Law. She teaches and writes on law and technology. Her scholarship explores the intersection of tech and civil liberties, primarily focusing on free expression, privacy and government accountability. Her interests include transparency and accountability for law enforcement, public access to information, and the use of new technologies in government decision-making. Prior to joining the faculty at Texas A&M, Bloch-Wehba taught at Drexel University’s Thomas R. Kline School of Law. She is also an Affiliated Fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project, an Affiliated Scholar at NYU School of Law’s Policing Project, and a Fellow at the Center for Democracy & Technology. Bloch-Wehba is a graduate of NYU School of Law, where she was an Institute for International Law & Justice/Law and Security Scholar, and of the University of Texas at Austin. From 2016–2018, she was a supervising attorney in Yale Law School’s Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic, a law student clinic dedicated to increasing government transparency, defending the essential work of news gatherers, and protecting freedom of expression by providing pro bono legal services, pursuing impact litigation and developing policy initiatives. Previously, Bloch-Wehba was the inaugural Stanton Foundation National Security–Free Press Fellow at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and worked as a litigation associate at Baker Botts LLP.

Ángel Díaz is counsel in the Liberty & National Security Program for the Brennan Center for Justice. His work focuses on the intersection of technology with civil rights and civil liberties. He is active on issues related to policing and technology, as well as matters related to online speech and content moderation. Prior to joining the Brennan Center, Díaz was an associate at Gunderson Dettmer, where he advised technology start-ups and venture capital firms on issues related to privacy, information security, and intellectual property. Díaz is a graduate of Berkeley Law and the University of California, Berkeley.

Kashmir Hill is a tech reporter for the New York Times. She writes about the unexpected and sometimes ominous ways technology is changing our lives, particularly when it comes to our privacy. She joined The New York Times in 2019, after having worked as an investigative reporter at Gizmodo Media Group and as a writer and editor at Fusion, Forbes Magazine, and Above the Law. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker and The Washington Post. In 2018, she gave a TED talk—"What your smart devices know (and share) about you"—in which she described what happened when she transformed her apartment into a smart home and monitored the data being sent out of it. She has degrees from Duke University and New York University, where she studied journalism.

Jeramie D. Scott is Senior Counsel at EPIC and Director of the EPIC Domestic Surveillance Project. His work focuses on the privacy issues implicated by domestic surveillance programs with a particular focus on drones, cybersecurity, biometrics, and social media monitoring. Mr. Scott regularly litigates open government cases and cases arising under the Administrative Procedure Act. He is also a co-editor of "Privacy in the Modern Age: The Search for Solutions” and the author of a recently published essay entitled “Social Media and Government Surveillance: The Case for Better Privacy Protections of Our Newest Public Space.” Prior to joining EPIC, Mr. Scott graduated from the New York University Law School where he was a clinic intern at the Brennan Center's Liberty and National Security Program. His work at the Brennan Center focused on civil liberty issues arising from local law enforcement surveillance. He also served as a research assistant for Professor Ira Rubinstein, focusing on the role of privacy-enhancing technologies in alleviating consumer privacy issues. Mr. Scott holds a Bachelor of Science in Symbolic Systems and a Master's degree in Philosophy, both from Stanford University. He is a member of the bar of D.C. and New York State.

Panel 6: Executive Branch Accountability

Heidi Kitrosser is a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School. She was a visiting professor at the Law School from 2005-06, and an assistant professor at Brooklyn Law School from 2003-2006. Kitrosser is an expert on the constitutional law of federal government secrecy and on separation of powers and free speech law more broadly. She has written, spoken, and consulted widely on these topics. Her book, Reclaiming Accountability: Transparency, Executive Power, and the U.S. Constitution, was published in 2015 by the University of Chicago Press. It was awarded the 2014 IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law / Roy C. Palmer Civil Liberties Prize. Kitrosser’s articles have appeared in many venues, including Supreme Court Review, Georgetown Law Journal, UCLA Law Review, Minnesota Law Review, and Constitutional Commentary. In 2017, she was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to begin work on a book project on U.S. government whistleblowers. Kitrosser is on the steering committee of a new initiative – the Free Expression Legal Network (FELN) spearheaded by Yale’s Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic and the Reporter’s Committee for Freedom of the Press. FELN is a network of law school clinics, academics, and practitioners (including nonprofits) across the country that seeks to promote and protect free speech, free press, and the flow of information. Kitrosser also sits on the boards of the Minnesota Coalition for Government Information (MNCOGI) and Public Record Media. Kitrosser graduated from UCLA in 1992, summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, with a B.A. in political science. She received her J.D. degree from Yale Law School in 1996. During her third year at Yale, she won the Harlan Fiske Stone Prize for best oral argument in the Morris Tyler Moot Court of Appeals. Following law school, she clerked for Judge William Rea on the District Court for the Central District of California and for Judge Judith Rogers on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. She also worked as an associate at the Washington, D.C., office of Jenner & Block.

Danielle Brian is the Executive Director of the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), a nonpartisan independent government watchdog whose investigations into corruption, misconduct, and conflicts of interest achieve a more effective, accountable, and ethical federal government. Ms. Brian has testified before Congress over 40 times. In the past decade, POGO’s investigative work has received journalism awards such as the Sigma Delta Chi award, the Robert D.G. Lewis Watchdog Journalism Award, the Dateline Award, and others. POGO has received the highest reviews for organizational and financial performance from the three largest charity evaluators in the country: Charity Navigator, Better Business Bureau, and Greatnonprofits.org. Under her leadership, the organization has grown from two employees and a budget in the thousands of dollars in 1993 to an organization with over forty staff and a budget of six million. Ms. Brian has been recognized by the National Journal as one of the top 50 people changing the game in Washington, receiving top rankings for her impact and innovation in the field of political activism. She is a member of the Freedom of Information Act Hall of Fame, and received the Smith College Medal. Danielle received her Bachelor of Arts in Government from Smith College, and her Master’s Degree in International Relations from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

Hon. John Gleeson is a litigation partner in the White Collar & Regulatory Defense and Commercial Litigation Groups at Debevoise & Plimpton. He is a trial and appellate lawyer in both federal and state courts, having tried more than 20 cases and argued more than 30 appeals in various federal circuit courts. On May 11, 2020, Judge Gleeson co-authored an op-ed concerning the Department of Justice's motion to dismiss the indictment charging former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn with false statements. It pointed out that dismissal was not automatic, but rather required leave of the court. Two days later, Judge Emmet G. Sullivan appointed Judge Gleeson as amicus curiae to argue against DOJ’s motion and to advise the court regarding whether perjury charges should be brought against Flynn. Prior to joining Debevoise in 2016, Judge Gleeson was a United States District Judge in the Eastern District of New York for 22 years. He presided over more than 200 civil and criminal jury trials and authored more than 1,500 published opinions, including 14 for the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, where he sat by designation. Judge Gleeson served on the Judicial Conference Committee on Defender Services for nine years (including three years as Chair).

Before his appointment to the bench in 1994, Judge Gleeson was a federal prosecutor in the same courthouse for 10 years. He served as Chief of the Criminal Division, Chief of Appeals, Chief of Special Prosecutions, and Chief of Organized Crime. Among the numerous high-profile cases he tried, Judge Gleeson was the lead prosecutor in the murder and racketeering convictions of John Gotti and Victor Orena, the bosses of the Gambino and Colombo Families of La Cosa Nostra, respectively. Judge Gleeson received the Attorney General’s Distinguished Service Award for his service in the Gotti case. Prior to becoming a federal prosecutor, Judge Gleeson was a litigation associate at Cravath, Swaine & Moore for four years and a law clerk for the Hon. Boyce F. Martin, Jr. on the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. He is an alumnus of Georgetown University and the University of Virginia School of Law. Judge Gleeson has taught law for more than 30 years. He currently teaches Complex Federal Investigations at Harvard Law School and Sentencing at New York University School of Law. He is a co-author of the widely used treatise Federal Criminal Practice: A Second Circuit Handbook (LexisNexis), which is now in its 20th edition. Judge Gleeson is a fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers, a member of the American Law Institute, a trustee of the Vera Institute of Justice, a member of the Advisory Boards of the Program on Corporate Compliance and Enforcement and the Center on Civil Justice at NYU School of Law, and a member of the Board of Directors of the Federal Defenders of New York.

Oona A. Hathaway is the Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law and Counselor to the Dean at the Yale Law School. She is also Professor of International Law and Area Studies at the Yale University MacMillan Center, on the faculty at the Jackson Institute for International Affairs, and Professor of the Yale University Department of Political Science. She is a member of the Strategic Initiatives Committee of the American Society of International Law, Yale University’s Provost’s Committee on International Affairs, and the Advisory Committee on International Law for the Legal Adviser at the United States Department of State. In 2014-15, she took leave from Yale Law School to serve as Special Counsel to the General Counsel for National Security Law at the U.S. Department of Defense, where she was awarded the Office of the Secretary of Defense Award for Excellence. Professor Hathaway earned her B.A. summa cum laude at Harvard University in 1994 and her J.D. at Yale Law School, where she was Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Law Journal, in 1997. She served as a Law Clerk for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and for D.C. Circuit Judge Patricia Wald, held fellowships at Harvard University’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and Center for the Ethics and the Professions, served as Associate Professor at Boston University School of Law, as Associate Professor at Yale Law School, and as Professor of Law at U.C. Berkeley. Her current research focuses on the foundations of modern international law, the intersection of U.S. constitutional law and international law, the enforcement of international law, and the law of armed conflict. She is a principal investigator on a recent grant awarded by Hewlett Foundation to study cyber conflict. She has published more than twenty-five law review articles, and she is the co-author of The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World (with Scott Shapiro).

Jameel Jaffer is the Executive Director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, which defends the freedoms of speech and the press through strategic litigation, research, and public education. Until August 2016, Jaffer served as deputy legal director at the ACLU, where he oversaw the organization’s work on free speech, privacy, technology, national security, and international human rights. He litigated some of the most significant post-9/11 cases involving human rights and national security, including cases relating to surveillance, secrecy, censorship, interrogation, detention, and extrajudicial killing. Jaffer’s recent writing has appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, and the Yale Law Journal Forum. He is an executive editor of Just Security, a national security blog, and his most recent book, The Drone Memos, was one of the Guardian’s “Best Books of 2016.” He is a graduate of Williams College, Cambridge University, and Harvard Law School, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. He served as a law clerk to Hon. Amalya L. Kearse of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and then to Rt. Hon. Beverley McLachlin, Chief Justice of Canada. He currently serves on the board of the Pierre Elliot Trudeau Foundation, on the advisory board of First Look Media’s Press Freedom Litigation Fund, and on the advisory board for the Center for Democracy and Technology. Since 2016 he has also been a Distinguished Fellow at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.

Charlie Savage is Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and Washington correspondent for The New York Times. He is also the author of “Power Wars,” published in 2015, an investigative history of national-security legal policymaking in the Obama administration, and “Takeover” published in 2007, which chronicles the Bush-Cheney administration’s efforts to expand presidential power. Mr. Savage has been covering post-9/11 issues — including national security, individual rights and the rule of law — since 2003, when he was a reporter for The Miami Herald. Later that year, he joined the Washington bureau of The Boston Globe; he moved to the Washington bureau of The New York Times in 2008. He has also co-taught a seminar on national security and the Constitution at Georgetown University. Originally from Fort Wayne, Ind., Mr. Savage graduated from Harvard College and earned a master’s degree from Yale Law School as part of a Knight Foundation journalism fellowship. He lives in Arlington, Va., with his wife, Luiza Ch. Savage, executive director of editorial initiatives at Politico, and their children. His other journalism honors include the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award, the Gerald R. Ford Prize for Distinguished Reporting on the Presidency, the Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism, and the Constitution Project’s Award for Constitutional Commentary.

Saturday Panels

Panel 1: Creating Precedent Before the Facebook Oversight Board

Joel Simon has been executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists since 2006. Simon has led the organization through a period of expansion, notably in recent years, growing CPJ’s network of global correspondents, creating a new North America program focused on press freedom advocacy in the United States, and helping to develop an Emergency Response Team focused on safety and direct assistance to journalists in crisis around the world. Simon has participated in CPJ missions from Argentina to Zimbabwe. Under his leadership, CPJ has been honored with numerous awards, including the Thomas J. Dodd Prize in International Justice and Human Rights, a News & Documentary Emmy, and the 2018 Chatham House Prize, given for the most significant contribution to the improvement of international relations in the previous year. Simon has written widely on press freedom issues for publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian and The Wall Street Journal. He is a regular columnist for Columbia Journalism Review. Simon has appeared on international broadcasters including CNN, the BBC, NPR, FOX News, and Al Jazeera, and has participated in speeches and panels from United Nations to the Newseum, and at academic institutions ranging from Stanford University to Beloit College. Prior to joining CPJ in 1997 as Americas program coordinator, Simon worked for a decade as a freelance journalist in Latin America. He covered the Guatemalan civil war, the Zapatista uprising in Southern Mexico, the debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the economic turmoil in Cuba following the collapse of the Soviet Union. A graduate of Amherst College and Stanford University, he is the author of Endangered Mexico: An Environment on the Edge (Sierra Club Books, 1997), The New Censorship: Inside the Global Battle for Media Freedom (Columbia University Press, 2015); and We Want to Negotiate: The Secret World of Kidnapping, Hostages, and Ransom (Columbia Global Reports, 2018).

Thomas Hughes is the Director of the Oversight Board Administration, which was recently set up to make binding decisions regarding content on Facebook and Instagram. Between 2013 and early 2020 Hughes was the Executive Director of ARTICLE 19, an international human rights organisation that defends and promotes freedom of expression and information worldwide. Before that, Hughes was the Executive Director and founder of Diversity, an international advertising network for online news media in human rights-restricted countries and a co-founder of VirtualRoad.org, a secure hosting service that protects the websites of news media and civil society organisations. Hughes has also worked as the Deputy Director of the media development organisation International Media Support (IMS), and has had roles with the European Commission, United Nations and Organization for Security Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). Hughes was an independent advisor on human rights to UK Foreign Secretaries between 2016 and 2019, and is currently a non-political governor at the Westminster Foundation for Democracy (WFD).

Kate Klonick joined the St. John’s University School of Law faculty in 2018. She teaches Property, Internet Law, and a seminar on information privacy. Klonick's research centers on law and technology, using cognitive and social psychology as a framework. That has led to study in the areas of decision making, intellectual property, property, communications torts, norms, shaming, and governance. It has also led to interest in robotics, artificial intelligence, and Internet law. Most recently she has been studying and writing about private Internet platforms and how they govern online speech. Klonick's work has appeared in The Harvard Law Review, The Georgetown Law Journal, the peer-reviewed Copyright Journal of the U.S.A., The Maryland Law Review; and is forthcoming in The Southern California Law Review and Yale Law Journal. Her research on networked technologies' effect on social norm enforcement, freedom of expression, and private governance has appeared in the New York Times, New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Lawfare, Slate, Vox and numerous other publications. Professor Klonick holds an A.B. with honors from Brown University where she studied both modern American History and cognitive neuroscience, a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center where she was a Senior Editor on the Georgetown Law Journal, and a Ph.D. in Law from Yale Law School where she was also a resident fellow at the Information Society Project. She clerked for Hon. Eric N. Vitaliano of the Eastern District of New York and Hon. Richard C. Wesley of the Second Circuit.

Robert Post is Sterling Professor of Law at Yale Law School. He served as the School's 16th dean from 2009 until 2017. Before coming to Yale, he taught at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law. Post specializes in constitutional law, with a particular emphasis on the First Amendment. He is also a legal historian who is currently writing Volume X of the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the Supreme Court of the United States, which will cover the period 1921-30 when William Howard Taft was Chief Justice. Post has written and edited numerous books, including Citizens Divided: A Constitutional Theory of Campaign Finance Reform (2014), which was originally delivered as the Tanner Lectures at Harvard in 2013; Democracy, Expertise, Academic Freedom: A First Amendment Jurisprudence for the Modern State(2012), which was originally delivered as the Rosenthal Lectures at Northwestern University; For the Common Good: Principles of American Academic Freedom (with Matthew M. Finkin, 2009), which has become the standard reference for the meaning of academic freedom in the United States; and Prejudicial Appearances: The Logic of American Antidiscrimination Law (2001), which was original delivered as the Brennan Lectures at Berkeley. Post publishes regularly in legal journals and other publications; exemplary articles and chapters include “Data Privacy and Dignitary Privacy: Google Spain, The Right to be Forgotten, and the Construction of the Public Sphere” (Duke Law Journal, 2018); “The Politics of Religion: Democracy and the Conscience Wars,” in The Conscience Wars: Rethinking the Balance Between Religion, Identity, and Equality (Susanna Mancini and Michel Rosenfeld, eds., Cambridge University Press 2018); “Theorizing Disagreement: Reconceiving the Relationship Between Law and Politics” (California Law Review, 2010); “Roe Rage: Democratic Constitutionalism and Backlash” (with Reva Siegel, Harvard Civil-Rights Civil-Liberties Law Review, 2007); “Federalism, Positive Law, and the Emergence of the American Administrative State: Prohibition in the Taft Court Era” (William & Mary Law Review, 2006); “Foreword: Fashioning the Legal Constitution: Culture, Courts, and Law” (Harvard Law Review, 2003); and “Subsidized Speech” (Yale Law Journal, 1996). Post is a member of the American Law Institute and a fellow of both the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

David A. Schulz is a Floyd Abrams Clinical Lecturer in Law and Senior Research Scholar in Law at Yale Law School. Currently, he is a Senior Counsel for the Media Practice Group at Ballard Spahr, LLP, a national trial and appellate practice representing news and entertainment media in defamation, privacy, newsgathering, access, intellectual property and related First Amendment matters. He specializes in media law, First Amendment, and intellectual property, and has represented a broad range of media clients, including international newswire services, national and local newspapers, television networks and station owners, magazine and book publishers, cable news networks, and Internet content providers. He also lectures at Columbia Law School and regularly writes and speaks on media law issues. He is a graduate of Knox College, Yale University, and Yale Law School.

Mark Stephens is a partner at Howard Kennedy. Specializing in international, appellate and complex litigation, Mark Stephens has undertaken some of the highest profile cases in the country and abroad. Mark is a solicitor with expertise in constitutional, human rights, IP, media and regulatory work, defamation, privacy, media, art and cultural property, data protection and freedom of information, trusts litigation, intellectual property and international arbitration disputes. Mark has created a niche in international comparative media law and regulation. He acts in judicial reviews, Privy Council cases- Ultimate Appeal Court for parts of the Commonwealth, as well as, regulatory cases and inquiries. Mark practices before every level of court in England and Wales and also abroad before international tribunals and courts. He is also a Privy Council agent regularly working with a range of overseas lawyers. Mark is a qualified mediator. He can also assist clients in jurisdictions outside of the UK and has been retained by a number of governments to advise and to represent their interests including, Republic of Cyprus, Jamaica, Libya, Mauritius, and the Russian Republic. He has been appointed by the Foreign Secretary to the FCO Free Expression advisory board and the Lord Chancellor to be a Champion for the Community Legal Service. Mark became board chair of Internews Europe, an international charity dedicated to freedom of expression and trusted media in 2018. Mark chairs a number of bodies including, Global Network Initiative, Global Witness, Internews, the Design Artists Copyright Society, the Management Committee of the Programme in Comparative Media Law and Policy Wolfson College, Oxford Centre for Socio Legal Studies. He is former chair of the Contemporary Art Society, the University of East London. He additionally sits on the board as a Trustee of Index of Censorship, the Bianca Jagger Human Rights Foundation, Commonwealth Lawyers Association and Council of the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute and Human Dignity Trust. Mark regularly appears in print, on radio and television. Mark also lectures at Universities and Higher Education Institutions around the world.

Panel 2: Supporting Local Journalism

Katie Townsend is the Reporters Committee's Legal Director. She oversees the Reporters Committee’s legal services portfolio, including its direct litigation and amicus practices. She leads litigation efforts in public records, court access, and legal defense cases, and supervises the team of staff attorneys and legal fellows in both areas. She also manages partnerships where the Reporters Committee offers legal support and pre-publication review, particularly to documentary filmmakers and nonprofit newsrooms. Townsend joined the Reporters Committee as its first Litigation Director in 2014, becoming its Legal Director in 2018. Under her leadership, Reporters Committee attorneys have secured key victories for journalists and the First Amendment, including Carlson v. United States (7th Cir. 2016), Reporters Commitee for Freedom of the Press v. FBI (D.C. Circuit 2017); Golden v. New Jersey Insitute of Technology (3d. Cir. 2019), and In re: Application of Jason Leopold (D.C. Cir. 2020). Prior to joining the Reporters Committee, Townsend was a litigation associate in the Los Angeles office of Gibson Dunn & Crutcher LLP, where she specialized in media and entertainment litigation. Prior to joining Gibson Dunn, Townsend spent a summer in the Washington, D.C. office of Levine, Sullivan, Koch & Schulz LLP. Townsend was recognized in 2015 as a Washington, D.C. "Rising Star" by The National Law Journal and, in 2015, was named part of the "Next Gen - Hollywood's Up-and-Coming Execs 35 and Under" by the Hollywood Reporter. Townsend is a 2007 graduate of the University of Virginia School of Law, where she was a member of the editorial board of the Virginia Law Review. She graduated summa cum laude from the University of Florida in 2004 with a B.A. in English and a B.S. in broadcast journalism. While pursuing her undergraduate degrees, she worked as a reporter and news producer for a local AM news radio station.

Anne Galloway is the founder and editor of VTDigger and the executive director of the Vermont Journalism Trust. Galloway founded VTDigger in 2009 after she was laid off from her position as Sunday editor of the Rutland Herald and Times Argus. VTDigger has grown from a $16,000 a year nonprofit with no employees to a $2 million nonprofit daily news operation with a staff of 25. In 2017, Galloway was a finalist for the Ancil Payne Award for Ethics, the Al Neuharth Innovation in Investigative Journalism Award and the Investigative Reporters and Editors FOIA Award for her investigation into allegations of foreign investor fraud at Jay Peak Resort.

Mark Jackson is the Director of the First Amendment Clinic and Adjunct Professor of Law at Cornell Law School. He was most recently the Executive Vice President and General Counsel of Dow Jones & Co. Prior to that position, from which he resigned after 8 years, he was Associate General Counsel of HarperCollins Publishers, and before that a litigation associate and then partner at the New York law firm Squadron, Ellenoff, Plesent & Lehrer, where he practiced for twelve years. At the firm, Mark specialized in representing newspaper, magazine and book publishers, motion picture studios and television stations, both in conducting pre-publication and pre-broadcast review, and in litigating cases on behalf of those clients. He is currently serving as Legal Counsel for the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). Jackson is chair of the advisory board of The Miller Theatre at Columbia University and serves on the board of directors of The Magnum Foundation.

Jeremy Kutner is general counsel at ProPublica, where he provides legal advice on the organization’s full range of activities, with emphasis on its newsroom. He has litigated cases involving libel, freedom of information laws, subpoenas seeking testimony from reporters about sources, and access to sealed documents. Prior to joining ProPublica as deputy general counsel in 2018, Kutner practiced media law at Ballard Spahr (formerly Levine, Sullivan, Koch & Schulz), and was a First Amendment Fellow at The New York Times. He has also worked as a freelance journalist, with his writing from around the world appearing in outlets including the Times, HuffPost and The Christian Science Monitor. He graduated from Yale Law School and Yale University.

Panel 3: Nuts and Bolts: Litigating Abuses of Power

John Langford is Counsel at Protect Democracy. Before joining Protect Democracy, John was a Clinical Lecturer in Law, Associate Research Scholar, and the Floyd Abrams Fellow and Staff Attorney for the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic at Yale Law School. He previously clerked for the Honorable Robin S. Rosenbaum on the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit and worked as a litigation associate at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP. John received his J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was an Editor of the Yale Law Journal.

Alex Abdo is the inaugural Litigation Director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. He has been involved in the conception and litigation of nearly all of the Institute’s legal challenges. Abdo has been especially involved in the Institute’s recent lawsuit challenging the government’s system of “prepublication review,” which requires millions of former employees of the intelligence agencies to submit their manuscripts to government censors prior to publication; in the Institute’s groundbreaking challenge to the constitutionality of President Trump’s blocking of critics from his @realDonaldTrump Twitter account; in the Institute’s challenge to the pervasive secrecy of the Office of Legal Counsel’s formal written opinions, which establish the law for the executive branch; in the Institute’s challenge to the constitutionality of the NSA’s program of “upstream surveillance,” under which the agency scans the content of U.S. persons’ international communications as they transit the internet backbone inside the United States; and in the Institute’s advocacy efforts to persuade Facebook to create a safe harbor for research and journalism that would illuminate the influence that the company’s platform is having on society. Prior to joining the Institute, Abdo worked for eight years at the ACLU, where he was at the forefront of litigation relating to NSA surveillance, encryption, anonymous speech online, government transparency, and the post-9/11 abuse of detainees in U.S. custody. In 2015, he argued the closely watched appeal that resulted in the Second Circuit invalidating the NSA’s call-records program. Abdo graduated from Yale College and Harvard Law School. After law school, he clerked for the Hon. Barbara M.G. Lynn, United States District Judge for the Northern District of Texas, and for the Hon. Rosemary Barkett, United States Circuit Judge for the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals.

Theodore J. Boutrous, Jr., a partner in the Los Angeles office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, is global Co-Chair of the firm’s Litigation Group and previously led the firm’s appellate, crisis management, transnational litigation and media groups. He also is a member of the firm’s Executive and Management Committees. Recognized as a tireless advocate and leader for high-stakes and high-profile cases, Mr. Boutrous was named 2019 “Litigator of the Year, Grand Prize Winner” by The American Lawyer. Mr. Boutrous has represented clients in the federal and state appellate courts throughout the nation in a wide spectrum of cases. He has argued more than 100 appeals, including before the Supreme Court of the United States, 12 different federal circuit courts of appeals, nine different state supreme courts and a multitude of other appellate and trial courts in complex civil, constitutional and criminal matters. Mr. Boutrous has successfully persuaded courts to overturn some of the largest jury verdicts and class actions in history. In 2011, he successfully represented Walmart before the Supreme Court of the United States in the Dukes case, which unanimously reversed what had been the largest employment class action in history and established important standards governing class actions (Wal Mart Stores, Inc. v. Dukes). In 2013, he successfully represented the prevailing party in obtaining a unanimous Supreme Court decision enforcing the Class Action Fairness Act (Standard Fire Insurance Co. v. Knowles). Also in 2013, Mr. Boutrous successfully represented plaintiffs in the Supreme Court in a case invalidating California’s prohibition on same-sex marriage, Proposition 8 (Hollingsworth v. Perry), in which he also served as one of the lead trial lawyers and architects of the legal strategy that led to this landmark victory. Mr. Boutrous is currently handling a lawsuit on behalf of actor Ashley Judd against Harvey Weinstein seeking redress for the career-changing harm Mr. Weinstein caused when he defamed Judd to filmmakers in retaliation against Ms. Judd for having rejected Mr. Weinstein’s sexual advances. And Mr. Boutrous successfully represented Cable News Network, Inc. and Jim Acosta in bringing First Amendment and Due Process claims against President Donald Trump and other White House officials, forcing the White House to restore Mr. Acosta’s press credentials. As both a crisis management strategist and a seasoned appellate and media lawyer, Mr. Boutrous has extensive experience handling high-profile litigation, media relations and media legal issues. He routinely advises clients in planning how to respond, and in responding, to crises and other especially significant legal problems that attract the media spotlight. The National Law Journal, which in 2013 named him one of the 100 Most Influential Lawyers in America. The Hugh M. Hefner Foundation awarded him with the First Amendment Award in 2019. He also received the 2020 Freedom of Press Award from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and the Distinguished Leadership Award by PEN America in 2019 for his leadership in advancing rights and protecting freedom of expression.

Paul McAdoo is a Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press Local Legal Initiative staff attorney based in Tennessee. He joined the Reporters Committee from Adams and Reese LLP in Nashville, where he worked on a variety of complex litigation issues, including with media clients. Before joining Adams and Reese, Paul worked at another Nashville firm, Aaron & Sanders PLLC, an intellectual property boutique. His work in Tennessee included amicus briefs on behalf of media coalitions in the Tennessee Supreme Court and Tennessee Court of Appeals. Paul began his legal career at Thomas & LoCicero PL in Tampa, Florida, where his practice primarily included media law, First Amendment, copyright, trademark, and complex business litigation. Nationally, Paul is involved in both the American Bar Association Forum on Communications Law and the Media Law Resource Center, the former of which he had previously co-chaired the Training and Development committee. In Tennessee, he is active in the Tennessee Bar Association, including serving as the chair of the Fourth Estate Award committee and as the Communication Law Section's immediate past chair. With the support of the TBA and the Tennessee Association of Broadcasters, he founded the Tennessee Reporters Workshop, which provides an opportunity for Tennessee journalists to learn more about media law issues over the course of a two-day event. Paul is also a frequent author, including RCFP’s Sixth Circuit Open Courts Compendium and his article in the May 2018 Tennessee Bar Journal “The Right to Know: Sixth Circuit Sends Clear Message on Tough Standards for Sealing Judicial Records.” Paul attended the University of Florida Levin College of Law, where he graduated cum laude and Florida State University, where he graduated cum laude with liberal studies honors in history and international affairs.

Kristy Parker is Counsel at Protect Democracy. Before joining Protect Democracy, Kristy spent 15 years in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, most recently as a Deputy Chief, where she supervised and prosecuted federal criminal civil rights violations, including uses of excessive force by law enforcement officers, hate crimes, violence against reproductive health care providers, and human trafficking offenses. She also worked for 4 years in the DOJ’s Civil Division. Kristy has a D.Phil in Modern History from the University of Oxford and received her J.D. from Harvard Law School.

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Panel 5: Clinic Success Stories: TBD

Panel 6: FELN Steering Committee Meeting

Bruce D. Brown is the executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press in September and a former journalist and partner in the Washington office of Baker & Hostetler. He is a former lecturer at the University of Virginia Law School, where he co-directed its First Amendment Clinic, and a former adjunct faculty member in Georgetown University’s master’s program in professional studies in journalism. Brown has been published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Economist, USA Today, and The National Law Journal, among other publications. Prior to joining Baker & Hostetler, Brown worked as a federal court reporter for Legal Times and as a newsroom assistant to David Broder at The Washington Post. Brown received a J.D. from Yale Law School, a master’s in English Literature from Harvard University, where he was a Mellon Fellow in the Humanities, and a bachelor’s degree in English Literature from Stanford University.