Access & Accountability 2022

Speaker Bios

Floyd Abrams

Floyd Abrams is senior counsel at Cahill Gordon & Reindel LLP, and has been a Visiting Lecturer at Yale Law School and a Lecturer in Law at Columbia Law School. He is the author of three books about the First Amendment of which the most recent was The Soul of the First Amendment (2017). Mr. Abrams has argued numerous cases involving the First Amendment in the Supreme Court and lower courts. Among others, he was co-counsel to the New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case, counsel to the Brooklyn Museum in its litigation against New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, and counsel to Senator Mitch McConnell in the Citizens United case. Former Yale Law School Dean Robert Post has observed that "no lawyer has exercised a greater influence on the development of First Amendment jurisprudence in the last four decades."

Jim Brady

Jim Brady was appointed Vice President of Journalism for the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation in August 2021. Brady is a longtime digital media innovator whose experience ranges from leading major brands such as washingtonpost.com and Digital First Media to bootstrapping a company that built and sold local news sites in three cities. Brady has spent 35 years in journalism – 27 of those in digital – and has held a wide range of media executive roles, including Executive Editor of washingtonpost.com, Editor in Chief of Digital First Media, CEO of Spirited Media and Head of News and Sports for America Online. Brady also served as ESPN’s public editor from 2015-18. Brady is a Past President of the Online News Association, and, in 2017, received the Rich Jaroslovsky Award for his long service to ONA. He currently serves on the boards of the American Press Institute and the National Press Foundation and is a past board member of the NewsMedia Alliance, Local Media Association and The Poynter Institute’s National Advisory Board. He is also a two-time judge of the Pulitzer Prizes.

David Bralow

David S. Bralow is the First Amendment Counsel for First Look Media Works, Inc., publisher of The Intercept, an award winning news organization that practices fearless journalism to hold the powerful accountable.  He is also the Legal Director of the Press Freedom Defense Fund, which has recently supported the defense of Reality Winner. From First Amendment defense to engaging in complicated corporate transactions, Bralow has spent more than twenty years providing legal advice to media companies. His practice includes libel and privacy defense, access to government information under FOIA and state laws; content protection, including copyright and trademark advice, new media transactions, and regulatory advice, including telemarketing and consumer regulations. Prior to joining Pepper, Bralow was senior vice president and general counsel at Digital First Media (also known as MediaNews Group, Inc.). He previously served as assistant general counsel for the Tribune Company, where he provided legal advice to Tribune Company’s newspapers, websites and television stations. Prior to attending law school, Bralow was a reporter and editor for newspapers in New York, Pennsylvania and Florida. He also taught media law courses at City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism and New York University School of Continuing Professional Studies.

RonNell Anderson Jones

RonNell Andersen Jones is the Lee E. Teitelbaum Chair and Professor of Law at the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law and an Affiliated Fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project. A former newspaper reporter and editor, Professor Andersen 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. 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 the Washington Post, The New York Times, The Guardian, and other publications. Professor Andersen 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.

Suhad Babaa

Suhad Babaa is a producer, news publisher, and the Executive Director of Just Vision, an organization that fills a media gap on Israel-Palestine through independent storytelling and strategic audience engagement. Suhad has produced Boycott (2021) and executive produced Naila and the Uprising (2017). She is also the co-publisher of the award-winning Hebrew-language news site, Local Call. Additionally, Suhad helped lead the impact campaigns for Just Vision's critically acclaimed film, Budrus (2009), which was recognized with the Doc Society Social Impact Award in 2012, as well as the Peabody award-winning documentary, My Neighbourhood (2012), which has since helped support a global campaign to save Sheikh Jarrah, the community that sits at the heart of the film. Suhad has addressed dozens of audiences at venues including the United Nations, White House, Harvard University and film festivals, mosques, synagogues and churches across the country. She has worked closely with policymakers, faith and community leaders, educators and students as part of Just Vision's broader public engagement efforts. Her team's work has been featured by institutions including TED, Tate Britain and the Nobel Women's Initiative and highlighted in outlets including The New York Times, CNN, Yedioth Ahronoth, PBS, BBC, Channel 2 News (Israel), Ma'an News, Al Quds, The Forward and beyond. Suhad is a Sundance Creative Producing Fellow, Global Shaper with the World Economic Forum, and Term Member at the Council on Foreign Relations. Suhad graduated with honors from the University of Pennsylvania where she received a BA in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics.

Dustin Benham

Dustin Benham is the Charles P. Bubany Endowed Professor of Law at the Texas Tech University School of Law. His research focuses on confidentiality in civil courts.

Bruce Brown

Bruce D. Brown is the executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and a former journalist and partner in the Washington office of Baker & Hostetler. Prior to joining the firm, Brown worked as a federal court reporter for Legal Times and as a newsroom assistant to David Broder at the Washington Post. He 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.

Catherine Crump

Catherine Crump is a Clinical Professor of Law at the 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 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.

Chris Gelardi

Chris Gelardi is an investigative reporter for New York Focus, where he covers the state’s criminal-legal system. He has also investigated and written about US policing, militarism, and colonialism for The Nation, The Intercept, and more than a dozen other publications. He is based in New York City.

Elizabeth Goitein

Elizabeth (Liza) Goitein is senior director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty & National Security Program. Goitein is a nationally-recognized expert on presidential emergency powers, government surveillance, and government secrecy. Her writing has been featured in major newspapers and magazines including the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, the Atlantic, and the New Republic, and she has appeared frequently on MSNBC, CNN, and NPR. She has testified on several occasions before the Senate and House Judiciary Committees. Before joining the Brennan Center, Goitein served as counsel to Senator Russ Feingold, chairman of the Constitution Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and as a trial attorney in the Federal Programs Branch of the Civil Division of the Department of Justice. Goitein graduated from Yale Law School and clerked for the Honorable Michael Daly Hawkins on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. In 2021–22, she was a member of the inaugural class of Senior Practitioner Fellows at the University of Chicago’s Center for Effective Government.

Ashley Gorski

Ashley Gorski is a Senior Staff Attorney in the ACLU’s National Security Project, where she litigates and works on policy issues related to government surveillance, national security prosecutions, and racial and religious discrimination. Prior to joining the ACLU, Gorski worked at Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP and served as a law clerk to the Honorable Jon O. Newman, United States Circuit Judge for the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, and to the Honorable Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum, United States District Judge for the Southern District of New York. She is a graduate of Yale College and Harvard Law School.

Farhang Heydari

Farhang Heydari is the Legal Director of the Policing Project at the NYU School of Law. From 2019-22, Heydari served as the Policing Project’s inaugural Executive Director. During that three-year tenure, the Policing Project doubled in staff, tripled in budget, and opened several new project areas. Heydari has long worked on criminal justice reform. In addition to his work at the Policing Project, Heydari is a Lecturer in Law at Columbia Law School, having taught courses on civil rights litigation and mass incarceration. He joined the Policing Project from the civil rights law firm Neufeld, Scheck and Brustin, LLP, where he focused on representing individuals who have been victims of official misconduct. Heydari is a graduate of Harvard University and Columbia Law School, where he served as the editor-in-chief of the Columbia Law Review. After law school, Heydari clerked for Judge Diana Gribbon Motz of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals and Judge Kimba Wood of the Southern District of New York.

Mark Jackson

Mark H. Jackson is 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, Jackson 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.

Jameel Jaffer

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, and litigated many significant post-9/11 cases involving human rights and national security. 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, the 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 the Honorable Amalya L. Kearse of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and then to the Right Honorable 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.

Heidi Kitrosser

Heidi Kitrosser is the Robins Kaplan professor at the University of Minnesota Law School. She is currently a visiting professor at Northwestern – Pritzker School of Law and will join the Northwestern faculty as a tenured professor in fall 2022. 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 (U Chicago Press, 2015) 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. Kitrosser is on the steering committee of the Free Expression Legal Network (FELN), a new network of law school clinics, academics, and practitioners spearheaded by Yale’s Media Freedom & Information Access Clinic and the Reporter’s Committee for Freedom of the Press, which seeks to promote and protect free speech, free press, and the flow of information. 

Christina Koningisor

Christina Koningisor is a Associate Professor of Law at the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law and an Affiliated Fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project. She teaches and writes about administrative law, constitutional law, media law, and local government law. Koningisor’s scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in the Yale Law Journal, Columbia Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Northwestern University Law Review, and Minnesota Law Review. Koningisor is a graduate of Yale Law School and Brown University. She has previously served as a lawyer for the New York Times, a law clerk on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and a Fulbright fellow in Kuwait.

Meenakshi Krishnan

Meenakshi Krishnan is an associate in the media law practice at Davis Wright Tremaine LLP, where she counsels and defends journalists, media companies, and nonprofits in a wide range of content-related matters, including First Amendment, defamation, FOIA, copyright, and reporters’ shield law issues. She also provides pre-publication review for media and nonprofit clients, including The Markup, The Atlantic, and Vice. Prior to joining DWT, she worked as a 2019-20 legal fellow at the Knight First Amendment Institute and clerked for the Honorable James A. Wynn Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. She received her J.D. from Yale Law School, where she was a Student Director of the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic and an Executive Editor of the Yale Law Journal. A Fulbright scholar, Krishnan received her B.A. in History and Political Science from Wake Forest University and her M.Phil. in International Relations and Politics from the University of Cambridge. Her writing has appeared in Yale Law Journal Forum and Just Security, and she is an advisory board member of the Initiative for a Representative First Amendment.

Margaret Kwoka

Margaret Kwoka is the Lawrence Herman Professor in Law at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law. Prior to joining the Moritz faculty, she was a Professor of Law and Director of the Information Transparency Project at the University of Denver.  She teaches Civil Procedure, Federal Courts, Administrative Law, and a workshop on privacy and transparency. Professor Kwoka’s research interests center on information law, government secrecy, and the administrative law on transparency. Her articles have appeared in the Yale Law Journal, Duke Law Journal, Boston University Law Review, UC Davis Law Review, and Florida State Law Review, among others, and recent book, Saving the Freedom of Information Act, was published by Cambridge University Press. She has testified before Congress on government transparency, served on the Federal FOIA Advisory Committee at the National Archives and Records Administration, and won various awards for her teaching, her pro bono litigation, and also for her scholarship, including most recently the Harry J. Kalvin Prize for Empirical Scholarship from the Law and Society Association. In the 2022-2023 academic year, Professor Kwoka is completing research on independent oversight of transparency laws in México under a Fulbright-García Robles grant. Prior to joining the academy, she clerked for Judge Michael Murphy, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, and Chief Justice Phillip Rapoza, Massachusetts Appeals Court.  She also practiced as an attorney at Public Citizen Litigation Group, a public interest law firm in Washington, D.C., where she focused on government transparency litigation in federal court. Professor Kwoka is a graduate of Brown University and Northeastern University School of Law and a former education volunteer with the Peace Corps in Burkina Faso.

Thomas Leatherbury

Tom Leatherbury is a Senior Partner at Vinson & Elkins. He is an appellate lawyer with forty years of experience in state and federal appeals and trials. During that time, he has worked on commercial, tort, intellectual property and health care cases, as well as class actions. Leatherbury has made 37 appellate and countless trial court arguments, and has tried or handled the appellate-related portions of close to 20 jury trials. Leatherbury has regularly represented traditional and digital publishers and broadcasters in all aspects of media litigation throughout his career, including libel, privacy and other torts, reporter’s privilege, newsgathering and access, misappropriation, and breach of contract actions. Leatherbury is also deeply committed to training young lawyers in Continuing Legal Education courses and to an extensive range of pro bono work, from family to immigration to constitutional law. Among many other honors, he was recently named a fellow in the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers, was presented with the Dallas Bar Foundation Justinian Award, and was awarded a Presidential Citation from the State Bar of Texas for his commitment to helping its diversity and inclusion efforts.

Toni Locy

Toni Locy is Professor of Journalism and Mass Communications at Washington and Lee University. She was a journalist for 25 years who reported and wrote for some of the nation's biggest and best news organizations, specializing in the coverage of federal, state and local law enforcement, the federal trial and appellate courts, and the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2008 a federal judge held her in contempt of court for refusing to reveal the identities of confidential sources who provided information for stories she wrote for USA Today about the FBI's investigation into the deadly 2001 anthrax attack. Eventually the U.S. Justice Department settled a civil lawsuit filed by scientist Steven Hatfill and the judge vacated the contempt order against Professor Locy.

Jonathan Manes

Jonathan Manes is an attorney at the MacArthur Justice Center’s Illinois Office and a member of the teaching faculty at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, where he co-directs a practicum focused on media law and government transparency. His litigation and advocacy work focuses on government accountability and civil rights violations that flow from government surveillance, police technologies, and national security policies. He previously led MJC’s work on voting rights.

Freddy Martinez

Freddy Martinez is a Senior Researcher at the Project On Government Oversight. He has used FOIA over the last decade and is an expert on the use of emerging technologies and their implications on civil liberties when used by police departments. He is an expert on public record laws at both the local and national level.

David McCraw

David McCraw is Deputy General Counsel for the New York Times. He is the author of the book Truth in Our Times: Inside the Fight for Press Freedom in the Age of Alternative Facts (St. Martin’s 2019), an inside account of the legal battles that shaped the Times’ coverage of Donald Trump, national security, Harvey Weinstein, and the rise of political partisanship in America. At the Times, he serves as the lead newsroom lawyer, providing advice on newsgathering, libel, and access to courts. He also is the lead attorney for The Times's freedom-of-information litigation. The Times Legal Department has filed dozens of FOI suits over the past decade on behalf of reporters at the paper. McCraw also heads up The Times's international security operation, which works to protect journalists doing reporting in high-risk areas and responds when reporters are kidnapped or subject to illegal detention. He has been actively involved in pro bono work around the world in the area of press freedom and access to information. His work includes projects in Yemen, Montenegro, Kuwait, and Bahrain, and he has conducted workshops in Chile, Jordan, Russia, Cameroon, and various countries in Central and Eastern Europe. He is a graduate of the University of Illinois, Cornell University, and Albany Law School. McCraw teaches Media Law at Harvard Law School and is an adjunct professor at the NYU School of Law. He previously worked as a litigation associate at Clifford Chance, clerked for the Honorable Richard D. Simons at the New York Court of Appeals, and was deputy general counsel at the New York Daily News.

Lee Levine

During a career that spanned more than four decades, Lee Levine represented media clients in libel, invasion of privacy, reporter's privilege, access, copyright, and related First Amendment litigation, most recently as Senior Counsel at Ballard Spahr. In the U.S. Supreme Court, he argued for the media defendants in Harte-Hanks Communications, Inc. v. Connaughton and Bartnicki v. Vopper. Levine also served as an Adjunct Professor of Law at the Georgetown University Law Center for 25 years. He was the lead author of the treatise Newsgathering and the Law; he co-authored the casebook Media and the Law; and, 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. Levine 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.

Robert Litt

Robert Litt, former General Counsel for the Director of National Intelligence, is of counsel and co-chair of Morrison & Foerster’s Global Risk and Crisis Management group. He advises industry-leading organizations on sensitive national security and privacy matters, white collar investigations, and government enforcement actions. Litt has extensive experience advising clients on national security matters, including those relating to privacy and data security. In addition, he also has significant experience in civil and criminal litigation as well as investigations. Prior to joining Morrison & Foerster, Litt was General Counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), giving him a strong understanding of the intelligence community and its equities. Litt was unanimously confirmed by the Senate for this role, in which he oversaw a team of attorneys providing legal advice to the agency and led interagency national security meetings. Prior to joining ODNI, Litt worked at the Department of Justice, serving as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Criminal Division and as the Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General. He also served as special advisor to the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Canadian Affairs. Litt was also an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. In addition to his prolific government service, Litt has also had an extensive career in private practice as a partner at two global law firms, including leading a white collar practice. Additionally, Litt taught at both Columbia Law School and Yale Law School. He began his legal career as a law clerk for Judge Edward Weinfeld in the Southern District of New York and for Justice Potter Stewart of the U.S. Supreme Court. He holds a B.A. from Harvard College and an M.A. and J.D. from Yale University.

Eric Newton

Eric Newton is a writer and media consultant. He was managing editor of the award-winning Oakland Tribune under Robert and Nancy Maynard. He led the news history content team at the original Newseum, the acclaimed museum of news. At the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, he developed or managed more than $500 million in journalism and news innovation grants. At Arizona State University, he was innovation chief, helping advance the "teaching hospital model" of journalism education at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. He has won or shared in many awards, including a Pulitzer Prize, a Peabody Award and a Freedom of the Press Award. Newton has a B.A. in Journalism from San Francisco State, where he was named a distinguished alumnus, and an M.A. in International Relations from the University of Birmingham in England, where he was a Rotary International scholar. His books include Searchlights and Sunglasses and Capture the Moment: The Pulitzer Prize Photographs. When Mary Ann Hogan, his partner of 40 years, died in 2019, he finished Circle Way, her book about her father, longtime San Francisco Chronicle literary editor William Hogan. Newton is based in Mill Valley, California.

Suzanne Nossel

Suzanne Nossel is the Chief Executive Officer of PEN America, the leading human rights and free expression organization, and she is author of Dare to Speak: Defending Free Speech for All (Dey Street, 2020). She is a leading voice on free expression issues in the United States and globally, writing and being interviewed frequently for national and international media outlets. Her prior career spanned government service and leadership roles in the corporate and nonprofit sectors. She has served as the Chief Operating Officer of Human Rights Watch and as Executive Director of Amnesty International USA. During the first term of the Obama Administration, Nossel served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations, where she led U.S. engagement in the United Nations and multilateral institutions, on human rights and humanitarian issues. During the Clinton Administration, Nossel was Deputy to the U.S. Ambassador for UN Management and Reform at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, where she was the lead negotiator in settling U.S. arrears to the world body. During her corporate career, Nossel served as Vice President of U.S. Business Development for Bertelsmann and as Vice President for Strategy and Operations for the Wall Street Journal. Nossel is a featured columnist for Foreign Policy magazine and has published op-eds in the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, and dozens of other outlets, as well as scholarly articles in Foreign Affairs, Dissent, Democracy, and other journals. Nossel is a magna cum laude graduate of both Harvard College and Harvard Law School. In 2021, Nossel was selected as a member of the Oversight Board, an independent body using human rights principles to adjudicate decisions on Facebook and Instagram.

Robert Post

Robert Post is Sterling Professor of Law at Yale Law School. He served as the School's 16th dean from 2009 until 2017. 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; his articles have appeared in the Yale Law Journal, Harvard Law Review, Duke Law Journal, California Law Review, and William & Mary Law Review, among others. 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.

John Quinn

John Quinn is a partner at Kaplan Hecker & Fink LLP. He represents companies, institutions, and individuals in high-profile civil litigation and leads the firm’s efforts in a number of progressive public interest matters. Quinn was one of the founders of Kaplan Hecker & Fink in 2017. He advises a wide range of institutions from hedge funds to a prominent art estate on various litigation matters. In 2021, Quinn was recognized as a Rising Star by the New York Law Journal, and was included on Benchmark Litigation’s 40 & Under Hotlist for the Northeast United States. Quinn has led the firm’s efforts in a massive fraud case against former President Trump and his businesses, which has included defeating motions to compel arbitration both in the District Court and in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. He also has worked on multiple amicus briefs filed in the United States Supreme Court in cases challenging actions by the Trump administration and represented a student-led LGBTQ+ pride organization in Starkville, Mississippi. He also works with with law school externs and clinics in his current role, especially in high-profile public interest matters. Prior to helping launch Kaplan Hecker & Fink, Quinn spent six years in the litigation group at Sullivan & Cromwell LLP. Quinn clerked for the Honorable John R. Padova in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania in his hometown of Philadelphia. He is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School, where he participated in a criminal defense clinic and did summer refugee assistance work. Quinn is a member of the Federal Bar Council, a member of the board of the Federal Bar Foundation, and an Honorary Overseas Member of the Commercial Bar Association of London.

Judith Resnik

Judith Resnik is the Arthur Liman Professor of Law at Yale Law School, where she teaches about federalism, procedure, courts, equality, and citizenship. Her teaching and scholarship focus on the impact of democratic, egalitarian principles on government services, from courts and prisons to post offices; on the relationships of states to citizens and non-citizens; on the forms and norms of federalism; and on equality and gender. Professor Resnik’s books include Representing Justice: Invention, Controversy, and Rights in City-States and Democratic Courtrooms (2011, with Dennis E. Curtis), reissued in 2022 as an e-book, and Migrations and Mobilities: Citizenship, Borders, and Gender (2009, with Seyla Benhabib).  Recent essays related to this conference include Representing What? Gender, Race, Class, and the Struggle for the Identity and the Legitimacy of Courts, Law and Ethics of Human Rights (2021);  Constituting a Civil Legal System Called “Just”: Law, Money, Power, and Publicity, in New Pathways to Civil Justice in Europe (Xandra Kramer, Alexandre Biard, Jos Hoevenaars, and Erlis Themeli, eds., Springer, 2021); Collective Preclusion and Inaccessible Arbitration: Data, Non-Disclosure, and Public Knowledge (with Stephanie Garlock and Annie J. Wang), Lewis & Clark Law Review  (2020); The Functions of Publicity and of Privatization in Courts and their Replacements (from Jeremy Bentham to #MeToo and Google Spain), in Open Justice: The Role of Courts in a Democratic Society (Max Planck Institute, Luxembourg, Nomos, 2019);  and The Contingency of Openness in Courts: Changing the Experiences and Logics of Publics’Role in Court-Based ADR, Nevada Law Journal (2015). Professor Resnik chairs Yale Law School’s Global Constitutionalism Seminar and edits its online book series. Professor Resnik is also the founding director of Yale’s Arthur Liman Center for Public Interest Law which, since its inception, has supported more than 170 Yale Law School graduates for year-long fellowships working on behalf of communities and individuals in need of assistance, and which convenes colloquia, teaches classes, and does research. Its 2020 volume, Money and Punishment, and its 2019 book, Ability to Pay, are available as e-books, as are several monographs compiling survey data on the use of solitary confinement in the United States. Professor Resnik received an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship for two years to support writing her book Impermissible Punishments exploring how incarcerated people, insisting on their status as constitutional rights-holders, have affected the theory and practices of punishment. She is a member of the American Philosophical Society, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Managerial Trustee of the International Association of Women Judges. In 2018, she received an Honorary Doctorate in Laws from the University College London Faculty of Laws.

Trina Reynolds-Tyler

Trina Reynolds-Tyler is a data analyst at the Invisible Institute. She co-founded the Chicago Chapter of Data 4 Black Lives, and is an organizer with BYP100 and the Black Abolitionist Network. Before receiving her Masters of Public Policy from the University of Chicago, she worked closely with the Citizens Police Data Project and the Youth / Police Project.

Sima Sarrafan

Sima Sarrafan is Assistant General Counsel at Microsoft’s Corporate, External, and Legal Affairs, where she has worked in variety of capacities, including supporting the marketing and consumer business, and conducting internal investigations. Sarrafan has been active in pro bono legal support and has been twice named Pro Bono Volunteer of the year by Microsoft. In 2020, along with Davis Wright Tremaine, LLP, she co-founded ProJourn, a pro bono program supporting journalists, which has since evolved into a program now directed by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and supported through substantial investment by the Knight Foundation. Prior to joining Microsoft, Sarrafan was a Partner at Yarmuth Wilsdon Calfo LLP, where her practice focused on intellectual property and general litigation, had served as an Assistant United States Attorney for the District of Columbia and Trial Attorney at the Office of International Affairs at the Department of Justice, and was an associate attorney at Davis Wright Tremaine in communications and media law practice. In addition to her work at Microsoft and with ProJourn, Sarrafan currently serves as President of the Board of Directors of the Bellevue School District, where she has served for almost 5 years. She graduated from Vassar College with a B.A. in Economics and earned her J.D. from Harvard Law School, and has taught at Harvard College, Roger Williams School of Law, and Seattle University School of Law.

Charlie Savage

Charlie Savage is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and Washington correspondent for the New York Times. He is also the author of Power Wars (Little, Brown & Co, 2015), an investigative history of national-security legal policymaking in the Obama administration, and Takeover (Little, Brown & Co, 2007), which chronicles the Bush-Cheney administration’s efforts to expand presidential power. 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, Indiana, Mr. Savage graduated from Harvard College and earned a master’s degree from Yale Law School as part of a Knight Foundation journalism fellowship. 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.

Jessica Silver-Greenberg

Jessica Silver-Greenberg is an investigative reporter on the Business desk at the New York Times. She is a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist for a series on forced arbitration and a series on debt buyers. Her work has helped to expose pregnancy discrimination throughout the American economy, predatory lending, sexual harassment and illegal debt collection tactics. In 2015, she was part of a team of reporters who won a George Polk Award for showing how big banks and corporations have forced tens of millions of Americans to give up their day in court. Before joining the Times in 2012, she was a reporter at the Wall Street Journal. She has an English degree from Princeton University.

Roy Shapira

Roy Shapira is a Visiting Professor at Berkeley Law School, and an Associate Professor at Reichman University (IDC) in Israel. He focuses on the interactions between reputation, regulation and litigation. Shapira has published on this topic a book titled Law and Reputation (Cambridge University Press, 2020), and articles at leading law reviews, such as University of Chicago Law Review and Vanderbilt Law Review. He has also taught a course on the topic for six years at Harvard's Economics Department (winning six teaching excellence awards), and practiced law and reputation, serving as reputation consultant for a couple of years. Shapira received his SJD and LLM degrees from Harvard Law School, where both his Master's and doctoral theses won the Victor Brudney Prize (for best paper on corporate governance). He is currently working on projects on the difficulties in holding big business accountable, and the false allure of gatekeepers in corporate compliance.

David Schulz

David A. Schulz is a Floyd Abrams 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.

Stephen Stich

Stephen Stich is a Clinical Lecturer in Law, Associate Research Scholar in Law, and Local Journalism Fellow at the Yale Law School Media Freedom & Information Access Clinic. He has worked as an associate at a law firm and a law clerk for Justice Peter Rubin of the Massachusetts Appeals Court. He holds a J.D. from Yale Law School (where he was a member of the MFIA Clinic), an M.A. in philosophy from the University of Arizona, and a B.A. in philosophy from the University of Toronto.

Richard Tofel

Richard Tofel was the founding general manager of ProPublica from 2007-2012, and served as president from January 2013-September 2021. In this role, he had responsibility for all of ProPublica’s non-journalism operations, including communications, legal, development, finance and budgeting, and human resources. He was formerly the assistant publisher of the Wall Street Journal and, earlier, an assistant managing editor of the paper, vice president, corporate communications for Dow Jones & Company, and an assistant general counsel of Dow Jones. He served as vice president, general counsel and secretary of the Rockefeller Foundation, and as president and chief operating officer of the International Freedom Center, a museum and cultural center that was planned for the World Trade Center site. He is the author of several books, including Not Shutting Up: A Year of Reflections on Journalism (2020); ‘A Federal Offense of the Highest Order’: The True Story of How the Joint Chiefs Spied on Nixon, And How He Covered It Up (2019); Speaking Truth in Power: Lessons for Our Sorry Politics from Our Inspiring History (2018); Why American Newspapers Gave Away the Future (2012); and Restless Genius: Barney Kilgore, The Wall Street Journal, and the Invention of Modern Journalism (2009).

Genevieve Torres

Genevieve (“Genzie”) Bonadies Torres is the Associate Director for the Educational Opportunities Project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. Torres’ work focuses on providing Black, Indigenous, Latino/a, and other communities of color equal access to a quality education through immediate interventions and systemic reform. Her litigation matters include: combatting anti-diversity and inclusion efforts that censor speech related to race and sex in violation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments, promoting equitable access to higher education through race-conscious admissions and other diversity programs, challenging discriminatory practices in K-12 schools and higher education, and combatting the predatory practices of for-profit colleges. Recently, Torres has served as counsel for student amici at Harvard and intervenors at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the trials defending their universities’ right to consider race in admissions to promote diversity. Torres also co-leads litigation challenging the recently passed Oklahoma classroom censorship law that severely restricts conversations in school around race, sex, and the perspectives of historically marginalized communities. Prior to joining the Lawyers’ Committee, Torres served as an attorney at Centro Legal de la Raza in Oakland, California as a Public Service Venture Fund and Fine Fellow. Torres received her J.D. from Harvard Law School, during which time she worked as a student attorney with the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau (HLAB) where she co-led HLAB’s Eviction Clinic and the Wage and Hour practice. Prior to law school, Torres served as a sixth-grade teacher in Phoenix, Arizona where she taught both special education inclusion and gifted cohorts.

Erik Ugland

Erik Ugland is an associate professor in the Diederich College of Communication at Marquette University where he teaches courses in media law, ethics, and policy. He earned his BA, MA, JD and PhD degrees from the University of Minnesota where he was twice a fellow at the Silha Center for the Study of Media Ethics & Law. His research focuses primarily on the constitutional legitimacy of restraints on newsgathering and on the scope of free speech and press protections under U.S. and international law. His work has been published in leading law reviews (Washington Law Review, Ohio State Law Journal, Duke Journal of Constitutional Law & Public Policy, University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law), and in top communication journals (Journal of Mass Media Ethics, Journalism: Theory, Practice & Criticism). He is on the editorial board of both First Amendment Studies and Communication Law & Policy. He has earned several awards for his research, including the Franklyn S. Haiman Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Freedom of Expression, and the Carol Burnett Prize for Media Ethics Scholarship, as well as a Fulbright Scholar award (Czech Republic). He is also a past recipient of Marquette University’s highest teaching honor.

Nina Wang  

Ben Wizner

Ben Wizner is the director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, which works to ensure that civil liberties are enhanced rather than compromised by new advances in science and technology. For more than two decades, Ben has worked at the intersection of civil liberties and national security, litigating numerous cases involving airport security policies, government watch lists, surveillance practices, government censorship, targeted killing, and torture. Since July of 2013, he has been the principal legal advisor to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Wizner is a graduate of Harvard College and New York University School of Law and was a law clerk to the Honorable Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Lisa Zycherman

Lisa Zycherman is the Deputy Legal Director and Policy Counsel of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. She supervises Reporters Committee staff attorneys and legal fellows providing direct litigation and amicus support on issues affecting journalists and documentary filmmakers, including obtaining access to public records, access to court proceedings, and legal defense. As Policy Counsel, she also spearheads efforts to promote federal and state legislation on issues affecting newsgathering including anti-SLAPP measures, reporters’ shield, and government access. Prior to joining the Reporters Committee, Zycherman was Counsel at Davis Wright Tremaine LLP, where she specialized in media and First Amendment litigation. During her fifteen years in private practice, she worked on FOIA and court access issues, represented news and advocacy organizations in fighting SLAPP suits, and counseled media organizations on all manner of newsgathering and pre-publication and pre-broadcast matters. In 2019, Zycherman was named a Washington, D.C. “Rising Star” by the National Law Journal. She serves as an Executive Committee member of the Council for Court Excellence where she seeks to improve access to justice in the District of Columbia. She is also a frequent speaker on legal issues facing journalists, documentary filmmakers, and non-profit advocacy organizations. Zycherman is a 2004 graduate of the University of Maryland School of Law, where she was a member of the editorial board of the Maryland Law Review. She graduated from the University of Maryland in 2001, with honors, with a B.A. in English and a B.A. in History.