Access & Accountability 2023

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). 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."

RonNell Andersen Jones is a University Distinguished Professor and the Lee E. Teitelbaum Chair in Law at the University of Utah. She is an Affiliated Fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project. For the 2023-24 academic year, she is a Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. A former newspaper reporter and editor, Professor Andersen Jones is a First Amendment scholar who researches and writes on legal issues affecting the press and on the intersection between media and the courts, with an emphasis on the United States Supreme Court. Her work is particularly concerned with the role of the press in American democracy and the underdeveloped doctrines for identifying and safeguarding constitutionally protectable press functions in a changing media and political landscape. She is a widely cited national expert on newsgathering rights and a regular public commentator on press freedom issues. Her scholarly work on press access, the constitutional protections in media defamation suits, and the role of the press as a check on government has appeared in dozens of books and journals, including Northwestern Law Review, Michigan Law Review, UCLA Law Review, Minnesota Law Review, and the Harvard Law Review Forum.

Jack M. Balkin is Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment at Yale Law School. He is the founder and director of Yale's Information Society Project, an interdisciplinary center that studies law and new information technologies. He also directs the Abrams Institute for Freedom of Expression and the Knight Law and Media Program at Yale.

Jane Bambauer is the Brechner Eminent Scholar at the Levin College of Law and at the College of Journalism and Communications at the University of Florida. Bambauer’s research assesses the social costs and benefits of Big Data, and how new information technologies affect free speech, privacy, and competitive markets. She also serves as the co-deputy director of the Center for Quantum Networks, a multi-institutional engineering research center funded by the National Science Foundation, where she facilitates research on economic and regulatory policy for emerging markets in quantum technologies. Bambauer’s work has been featured in over 20 scholarly publications including the Stanford Law Review, the Michigan Law Review, the California Law Review, and the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies. Her work has also been featured in media outlets including The Washington Post, The New York Times, Fox News, and Lawfare. She holds a BS in Mathematics from Yale College and a JD from Yale Law School.

Jason R. Baron is a Professor of the Practice at the University of Maryland’s College of Information Studies. His research interests involve practical applications of AI, including in the cause of providing greater public access to government records. Baron served as a trial attorney and senior counsel at the Justice Department, where he litigated landmark lawsuits involving White House records, and was the first appointed Director of Litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration. Before his current appointment, he served as Of Counsel at Faegre Drinker.  His publications include being lead editor of the ABA book, "Perspectives on Predictive Coding and Other Advanced Search Methods for the Legal Practitioner" (2016). Baron is a recipient of the international Emmett Leahy Award in recognition of his achievements in the field of information and records management, and the Justice Tom C. Clark Outstanding Government Attorney Award from the Federal Bar Association. He received his B.A. magna cum laude with honors from Wesleyan University, and his J.D. from Boston University School of Law.

Johana Bhuiyan is a senior tech reporter and editor at The Guardian, focusing on surveillance of disenfranchised groups. As a tech accountability reporter, she is specifically interested in the way tech companies impact, infringe on or otherwise affect civil liberties. Bhuiyan has been reporting on tech and media since 2013 and previously worked at the Los Angeles Times, Vox Media, BuzzFeed News and Politico NY. Bhuiyan attended Lehigh University, where she studied journalism as well as global and religion studies.

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 decisionmaking.

Prior to joining the faculty at Texas A&M, Bloch-Wehba taught at Drexel University’s Thomas R. Kline School of Law. She is 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 and of the University of Texas at Austin. From 2016–2018, she was a supervising attorney in Yale Law School’s Media Freedom & Information Access Clinic. Previously, Bloch-Wehba was the inaugural Stanton Foundation National Security–Free Press Fellow at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and worked at Baker Botts.

Jim Brady is Vice President of Journalism for the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. 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.

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.

Yvette Cabrera is a senior reporter at the investigative news nonprofit, the Center for Public Integrity, where she covers inequality in economic and social well-being with a focus on environmental justice issues. She has reported extensively on the pervasiveness of toxic lead contamination, and her most recent series, Ghosts of Polluters Past, was honored with a 2023 international Sigma Award for Data Journalism. Her story on the devastating effects of uranium mining on the Navajo Nation also won a 2023 Paul Tobenkin Memorial Award from Columbia University and a 2023 national Edward R. Murrow Award. She serves as president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, and is a founding member of The Uproot Project, a network for environmental journalists of color.

Ben Camacho is a freelance documentary photographer and investigative journalist at Knock LA. His work focuses on state-sponsored violence and the communities impacted by it. In 2018 and '19, he documented the asylum seekers at the US/MX border as an independent journalist. He curated "No Country May Claim Us", a photography exhibit at Golden Gate University School of Law which shared stories about seeking asylum as a person of color. He chairs the legal committee at IWW's Freelance Journalists Union, where he organizes to provide legal support to journalists across the country. He co-founded West Side Storytellers, a documentary production team. He enjoys street photography, shows and breathing clean air. May or may not possess a flash drive with 9,310 photos on it.

Dale Cohen is Director of Documentary Film Legal Clinic at UCLA School of Law, where he leads a group of student-clinicians providing pro bono legal services to documentary filmmakers. His research interests include media, entertainment, and communications law.

Cohen also serves as Special Counsel to FRONTLINE, the award‐winning PBS documentary series where he counsels and leads the news team and producers on legal issues and ethical standards. His extensive experience as a media lawyer, litigator and news executive includes positions at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, NPR, Cox Enterprises, Inc. and Tribune Company. Cohen was also a litigation partner at the law firm of Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal (now Denton’s) in Chicago.

Cohen's teaching experience includes media law courses at University of North Carolina School of Law, Emory College, University of Maryland, and Northwestern University. He is a frequent speaker at documentary film festivals and media law conferences.

Cohen earned his B.A. cum laude at Syracuse University and his J.D. cum laude at Northwestern University School of Law. He is co-author of leading textbook Media and the Law.

Jason Conti is the Executive Vice President and General Counsel, Chief Compliance Officer at Dow Jones. As general counsel, he oversees the company’s legal department, which includes a team of professionals handling labor and employment, commercial agreements, privacy, IP, M&A, litigation, compliance, media law and a variety of other specialties.

As chief compliance officer, Conti manages the development of the company’s compliance program, including screening for compliance with international sanctions programs, enforcement of various company policies—such as the Dow Jones Code of Conduct—and bolstering internal systems and controls.

Conti joined Dow Jones in 2008 as vice president and associate general counsel. In 2014, he took on the role of deputy general counsel at Dow Jones where he managed domestic and international litigation, and served as the company’s lead press attorney. 

Before joining Dow Jones, Conti worked at Hogan & Hartson LLP where he defended media companies in defamation, privacy and copyright actions.

Susanne Craig is an investigative reporter at The New York Times. Since 2016 her reporting has focused on the finances of Donald Trump. Craig has won numerous awards during her career, including a Pulitzer Prize in 2019 for work that shattered Donald Trump’s myth that he is a self-made billionaire. Since joining The New York Times in 2010, Craig has covered Wall Street for The Times and has served as Albany bureau chief. Previously, Craig was a reporter at The Wall Street Journal and worked at The Globe and Mail, Canada's national newspaper.

Sue Cross is the Executive Director and CEO of the Institute for Nonprofit News, a network of more than 425 independent, nonprofit news organizations in North America. She joined INN in 2015 to build its emerging news network and advance social enterprise models for investigative and other public service journalism. Sue is a former senior vice president for the Associated Press global news agency, where she created digital news services, expanded Spanish language and Latin American operations, introduced video to more than a thousand online news sites and managed a national news cooperative.

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 criminal legal system, and she frequently litigates cases under the Freedom of Information Act and common law and First Amendment rights of access. Crump has litigated cases on behalf of clients in numerous federal district and appellate courts and in the California Supreme Court. She has testified before Congress, the European Parliament, and various state legislatures and municipal bodies. She recently served as Senior Policy Advisor for Criminal Justice in the White House Domestic Policy Council. She appears regularly in the news media, and her TED talk on automatic license plate readers has been viewed nearly 2 million times.

David Cuillier, Ph.D., is director of the Brechner Freedom of Information Project at the University of Florida. A former public affairs journalist from the Pacific Northwest, he co-authored the books The Art of Access: Strategies for Acquiring Public Records and Transparency 2.0: Digital Data and Privacy in a Wired World. He is former president of the National Freedom of Information Coalition and the Society of Professional Journalists, and is founding editor of the open-access peer-reviewed Journal of Civic Information. He currently serves on the Federal FOIA Advisory Committee under the National Archives and Records Administration and has testified three times before Congress regarding FOIA. He researches FOI issues and for the past 20 years has trained more than 10,000 journalists and citizens in how to acquire public records.

Anna Diakun is a staff attorney at the Knight Institute. Her work focuses on press freedom, government transparency, and government surveillance of speech.

Diakun is leading the Knight Institute’s effort to secure the release of records related to the Trump administration’s restrictions on speech of CDC scientists. She previously led litigation on behalf of Freedom of the Press Foundation and the Knight Institute to secure the release of records concerning government surveillance of journalists, as well as litigation seeking the disclosure of secret Office of Legal Counsel opinions issued at least 25 years ago. She also contributed to the Institute’s recent report titled “Covering Democracy: Protests, Police, and the Press.”

Prior to joining the Institute, Diakun was a fellow with the National Security Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, where she worked on issues related to the government’s use of lethal force abroad, military detention, surveillance, and discrimination against racial and religious minorities.

Diakun holds a B.A. in Political Science from Yale College, an M.A. in International Relations and European Studies from Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, and a J.D. from Yale Law School.

Laura K. Donohue is a Professor of Law at Georgetown Law, Director of Georgetown’s Center on National Security and the Law, and Director of the Center on Privacy and Technology. She writes on political theory, public law, constitutional law, federal courts, national security, and legal history. Her work on new and emerging technologies centers on social media, biometric identification, augmented and virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and drones. Her book, The Future of Foreign Intelligence: Privacy and Surveillance in a Digital Age, won the 2016 IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law/Roy C. Palmer Civil Liberties Prize. She also wrote The Cost of Counterterrorism: Power, Politics, and Liberty; and Counterterrorist Law and Emergency Law in the United Kingdom 1922-2000.

Clare Garvie is a privacy lawyer whose work focuses on the intersection between new technologies and civil and due process rights. She currently serves as Training and Resource Counsel with the Fourth Amendment Center at NACDL, providing trainings and technical assistance to ensure defense lawyers across the country can best protect clients’ constitutional rights in the face of emerging technologies. Prior to joining NACDL, Clare was a Senior Associate with the Center on Privacy and Technology, a think tank based at Georgetown Law. She was the lead researcher and author on a number of the Center’s reports on police use of face recognition. She has testified before the House Oversight Committee and state legislatures and worked with legislators on both sides of the aisle on privacy legislation. Her commentary has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. She holds a J.D. from Georgetown Law and a B.A from Barnard College in Political Science, Human Rights, and Psychology.

Ellen P. Goodman is Distinguished Professor at Rutgers Law School, where she has also served as Assoc. Dean for Strategic Initiatives. She is currently on leave, serving as Senior Advisor for Algorithmic Justice at NTIA, U.S. Department of Commerce. At Rutgers, she co-directs and co-founded the Rutgers Institute for Information Policy & Law (RIIPL) and was until recently a Senior Fellow at the German Marshall Fund. Goodman has published widely on media and telecommunications law, smart cities and algorithmic governance, freedom of expression, and advertising law. She served in the Obama Administration as a Distinguished Visiting Scholar with the Federal Communications Commission and has been a visiting scholar at the London School of Economics and the University of Pennsylvania. She has been the recipient of Ford Foundation, Knight Foundation, Democracy Fund, and Geraldine R. Dodge grants for work on public interest journalism, new public media structures, and transparency initiatives. Prior to joining the Rutgers faculty, Goodman was a partner at the law firm of Covington & Burling LLP, where she practiced in the information technology area. She is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, clerked for Judge Norma Shapiro on the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, and has three children.  

Eric Gorski is a Managing Editors for Local News at Chalkbeat. He was previously Bureau Chief of Chalkbeat Colorado. Gorski has worked as an investigative and projects reporter for The Denver Post, a national writer for The Associated Press, and a reporter for The (Colorado Springs) Gazette, The Oregonian, and the Anderson (S.C.) Independent-Mail. He was twice named the Religion Newswriters Association’s Religion Writer of the Year, and was part of The Denver Post staff’s Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the 2012 Aurora theater shooting. Gorski is a graduate of the William Allen White School of Journalism at The University of Kansas.

Dana Green is Senior Counsel at The New York Times Company where she advises on newsgathering and publication issues and litigates freedom of information, defamation, and other content-related matters. Prior to joining The Times, Dana was with the media law practice at Ballard Spahr and Levine Sullivan Koch & Schulz. She is Chair of the International Bar Association's Media Law Committee, Co-Chair of the ABA's Women in Communication Law, a member of the board of Cartoonists Rights Network International, and Secretary of the Journalism Refugee Education Fund, an organization that supports members of the media and their families forced to become refugees as a result of their work.

Kashmir Hill is a tech reporter at 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 Times in 2019, after working 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. She is the author of Your Face Belongs To Us: A Secretive Startup’s Quest To End Privacy As We Know It.

Spencer S. Hsu is an investigative reporter at The Washington Post. He is a two-time Pulitzer finalist and national Emmy Award nominee. Hsu has covered homeland security, immigration, Virginia politics and Congress. He received the Sigma Delta Chi award and Ursula and Gilbert Farfel Prize for excellence in investigative journalism in 2012.

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.

Rob Johnson is a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, where he litigates to protect private property, free speech, and other individual rights. Rob litigates cases involving irrational and overbearing exercises of government power. He also litigates to uphold the right to financial privacy. Rob’s writing has been published in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Politico, and Reason, among other venues. Rob has testified about occupational licensing before the House and Senate Judiciary Committees and has twice testified about civil forfeiture before the House Ways & Means Oversight Subcommittee. He has also testified before state legislatures across the country.

Heidi Kitrosser is the William W. Gurley Professor of Law at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law. 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 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 is an Associate Professor of Law at the UC Law San Francisco (formerly UC Hastings) 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. Previously, she was an Associate Professor at University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law.

Chris Krewson is Executive Director of LION Publishers. He works with LION Publishers’ Board of Directors to set the organization’s vision and strategic direction, executes its strategic plan, leads fundraising and budgeting, works closely with the Deputy Director and engages with industry groups. He’s a former VP of strategy for Spirited Media, former top editor at Philadelphia’s Billy Penn, and the former top digital editor for Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Morning Call of Allentown, Pa. He is based in Havertown, just outside Philadelphia.

Tom Leatherbury is a Clinical Professor of Law and Director of the First Amendment Clinic at Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law. He is a trial and appellate lawyer with forty years of experience in state and federal court. 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 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 and the Texas Access to Justice Commission’s Harry M. Reasoner Justice for All award.

Jack Lerner is Clinical Professor of Law at UCI Law. His work focuses on problems at the intersection of law and technology, particularly how technology law and policy affect innovation and creative expression. He has written and spoken widely on copyright, privacy and other areas of technology law.

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.

Emma Llansó is the Director of the Center for Democracy and Technology’s Free Expression Project, where she works to promote law and policy that support Internet users’ free expression rights in the United States, Europe, and around the world. Llansó’s work spans many subjects, including human trafficking, privacy and online harassment, online child safety, terrorist propaganda, and disinformation. In particular, she focuses on the capabilities and limitations of machine learning techniques and other forms of automation in content moderation and analysis of online speech.

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. Manes has published scholarly work on the conflicts between secrecy and democratic accountability, focusing on surveillance technologies and national security.  His academic writing has appeared in the Georgetown Law Journal, Berkeley Technology Law Journal, and Yale Law Journal Forum. Manes is a co-founder and member of the steering committee of the Free Expression Legal Network. He previously served on the board of the New York Civil Liberties Union. He clerked for Justice Morris J. Fish of the Supreme Court of Canada. He graduated from Yale Law School, the London School of Economics.

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, an inside account of the legal battles that shaped the Times’s 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. He is a graduate of the University of Illinois, Cornell University, and Albany Law School. McCraw is an adjunct faculty member at Harvard Law School, where he teaches a course on media law.

Maxwell S. Mishkin is an attorney in the Washington, DC office of Ballad Spahr, where he represents journalists, news organizations, NGOs, and other content creators of all types in a wide range of matters. He regularly defends media clients against defamation, privacy, and intellectual property claims, in addition to providing them prepublication counseling and newsgathering advice. Max also has experience litigating under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and challenging restrictions on the rights of access to court records and proceedings.

Michael Morisy is Cofounder and Chief Executive Officer of MuckRock. He was previously an editor at the Boston Globe, where he launched the paper's technology vertical BetaBoston. He was a 2018-19 nonresidential fellow at Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri, a 2014-15 John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University and a 2012-13 Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics Network Fellow at Harvard University. He graduated in 2007 from Cornell University with a degree in English.

Martha Murphy is Deputy Director of the Office of Government Information Services (OGIS), the Federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Ombudsman. Prior to joining OGIS in 2018, Murphy had a broad range of experiences in FOIA – including processing records for release, managing a successful FOIA program, and setting nationwide FOIA policy for agency records that are a part of the National Archives’ historical records collection. As part of her work at OGIS, Murphy has supported the Chief FOIA Officers Council Technology Committee in their efforts to identify technology solutions to improve agency FOIA processes.  

Clare R. Norins is an Assistant Clinical Professor at the University of Georgia School of Law and the inaugural Director of the School of Law’s First Amendment Clinic, which represents clients in federal and state court on a range of First Amendment and media law issues. Representative matters include social media blocking by government officials, retaliatory arrest, the right to record, challenges to unconstitutional permit requirements, assertion of the journalist privilege under the Georgia Shield law, and defamation defense.

In 2021, Norins was a co-recipient of the national Clinical Legal Education Association’s award for Excellence in a Public Interest Case in recognition of collaborative advocacy on behalf of noncitizens retaliated against for speaking out about medical abuse they experienced in a Georgia detention center.

Norins’ scholarship has been published in the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law and the George Mason University Civil Rights Law Journal. 

Previously, Norins served as assistant director of the UGA Equal Opportunity Office; was an assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Bureau of the New York State Office of the Attorney General; and litigated plaintiffs-side police misconduct and employment discrimination cases as an associate with Beldock, Levine & Hoffman.  

Jeremy Scahill is a Senior Correspondent and Editor-at-Large at The Intercept. He is one of the three founding editors. He is an investigative reporter, war correspondent, and author of the international best-selling books, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield and Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. He has reported from Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, Nigeria, the former Yugoslavia, and elsewhere across the globe. He was the lead reporter for The Intercept’s groundbreaking series, The Drone Papers, which was based on the largest leak of secret government documents on U.S. drone strikes in history.

Scahill's work has sparked several congressional investigations and won some of journalism’s highest honors. He was twice awarded the prestigious George Polk Award and was among the first recipients of the Windham-Campbell Prize for Literature at Yale University. Scahill is a producer and writer of the award-winning film Dirty Wars, which premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award.

Matthew Schafer is Vice President, Assistant General Counsel, Litigation at Paramount Global. He handles content litigation across Paramount subsidiaries like CBS News, Showtime, and Simon & Schuster, with a focus on defamation and access claims. He also teaches media law at Fordham University School of Law and regularly writes on press freedom in the popular press and law reviews around the country. He serves as a board member of the Media Law Resource Center Institute and on the advisory committee for Lawyers for Reporters. Previously, he was newsroom counsel at BuzzFeed News, where he advised on day-to-day liability stemming from gathering and reporting the news. He began his career at the First Amendment litigation boutique Levine Sullivan Koch & Schulz. He earned his J.D. from Georgetown University and holds degrees from the University of Illinois and Louisiana State University.

Jason M. Schultz is a Professor of Clinical Law, Director of NYU's Technology Law & Policy Clinic, and Co-Director of the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy. His clinical projects, research, and writing primarily focus on practical frameworks and policy options to help traditional areas of law such as intellectual property, privacy, consumer protection, and civil rights adapt in light of new technologies and the challenges they pose. His most recent work focuses on the social and legal implications of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things.

With Aaron Perzanowski, he is the author of The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy, which argues for retaining consumer property rights in a marketplace that increasingly threatens them.

David A. Schulz is Director of the Media Freedom & Information Access Clinic, where he serves as the Floyd Abrams Clinical Lecturer and a Senior Research Scholar, and is Senior Counsel to the media and entertainment law group at Ballard Spahr LLP where his practice is concentrated in media law, First Amendment, and intellectual property litigation. Over the past four decades he has handled a wide variety of lawsuits and appeals in federal and state courts located throughout the United States, including precedent-setting cases on the public’s right of access to government proceedings and information, and the scope of constitutional protection for newsgathering.

Schulz is a co-author of the leading treatise on newsgathering, Newsgathering and the Law, 5^th ed and the author of numerous scholarly articles. He currently serves on the New York Committee on Open Government, the State agency responsible for overseeing the open meetings, freedom of information and personal privacy laws, and is a General Trustee of Knox College, in Galesburg, Illinois. He is a graduate of Knox College, Yale University, and Yale Law School.

Shereen Siewert is the founder and publisher of Wausau Pilot & Review, a 501c3 nonprofit, local, online news organization covering Wausau area issues. She is the former news editor of The City Pages, a weekly news and entertainment weekly. Shereen joined Gannett Wisconsin Media in 2012 and was named to the I-Team in 2014. She has written extensively about the criminal justice system, winning five Golden Gavel Awards from the State Bar of Wisconsin. Projects delved into wrongful incarcerations, child pornography investigations and active hate groups in the state. She is based in Wausau. Outside of work, Shereen can often be found in a kayak, on her bike, rooting for Wisconsin sports teams, or taking impromptu road trips.

Juliet Sorensen is the executive director of Injustice Watch, a Chicago-based nonprofit, nonpartisan journalism organization that focuses on issues of equity and justice in the court system. She is also a Clinical Professor of Law at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, where she is associated with the Center for International Human Rights.

Stephen Stich Match is an attorney in the transparency practice at Loevy & Loevy. He represents clients in government accountability matters with an emphasis on the Freedom of Information Act.

Before joining Loevy & Loevy, Stephen worked as a Clinical Lecturer at the Yale Law School Media Freedom & Information Access Clinic. There he taught and litigated cases under FOIA, states’ public record laws, the First Amendment (both free speech and the right of access to courts), defamation, and related matters. His successes include forcing the release of records showing state jails recording and listening to privileged telephone calls between inmates and their lawyers, and hundreds of incident reports documenting inmates’ deaths. Before that, Stephen worked as a litigator at Foley Hoag and a two-year law clerk for Justice Peter Rubin of the Massachusetts Appeals Court.

Nabiha Syed is the chief executive officer of The Markup, an award-winning media startup that challenges technology to serve the public good. Syed has been recognized by the NAACP as a digital civil rights icon in 2023. 

Syed has tackled First Amendment issues at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; represented asylum-seekers in south Texas; counseled on whether to publish hacked material; and advised two presidents on free speech in the digital age. For her legal work, she was named a “40 Under 40 Rising Star” by the New York Law Journal, received an inaugural Reporter's Committee for the Freedom of the Press award, and invited to deliver the Salant Lecture at Harvard. She holds a law degree from Yale Law School and from Balliol College, Oxford University, which she attended as a Marshall Scholar.

Prior to The Markup, as BuzzFeed's first newsroom lawyer, she oversaw high-stakes litigation as well as select international, security, and cross-company strategic initiatives. Prior to that, she was a lawyer at Levine Sullivan Koch & Schulz and the First Amendment Fellow at The New York Times. She serves on the boards of the New York Civil Liberties Union, The New Press, and the Scott Trust.

Dorothy Tucker has been a reporter for CBS2 Chicago since 1984. Currently, she is a reporter on the station's 2 Investigator team and is the immediate past President of the National Association of Black Journalists.

Tucker has been honored numerous times. In 2022, she won the Robert G. McGruder Award for Diversity Leadership from the News Leaders Association. In 2021, she won two regional Edward R. Murrow awards and was part of the news team that won a national Murrow for overall excellence. Tucker is also the recipient of the 2021 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Chicago Association of Journalists and 2021 winner of a Midwest Regional Emmy for her investigation on "Eviction Moratorium Leaving Landlords Homeless". She joined CBS2 Chicago from KDKA-TV in Pittsburgh, where she worked as a general assignment reporter and talk show host. Prior to that, Tucker worked at KWGN-TV in Denver, WREG-TV in Memphis and WMBD-TV in Peoria.

Tucker graduated with honors from Northwestern University. She is a former board member of Northwestern Alumni Association and a current member of the Northwestern University Leadership Circle. She is the mother of three millennials. 

Brandon L. Van Grack co-chairs the National Security and Global Risk + Crisis Management groups at Morrison Foerster. His practice focuses on investigations, criminal defense, and compliance matters involving sanctions and export controls, foreign investment, and cyber incidents. Brandon’s arrival to Morrison Foerster follows more than a decade of service at the U.S. Department of Justice, where he held multiple senior national security positions. In those positions, he helped identify and manage the U.S. government’s tools to address perceived national security threats in China and Russia, oversaw every criminal investigation involving sanctions and export controls, was Chief of DOJ’s Foreign Agents Registration Act Unit, and served as a lead prosecutor for Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. He also led and supervised investigations and prosecutions involving espionage and the mishandling of classified information, and was the DOJ’s Leak Czar.

Rebecca Wexler is Faculty Co-Director of Berkeley Center for Law & Technology and Assistant Professor of Law at Berkeley Law. Her teaching and research focus on data, technology, and secrecy in the criminal legal system, with a particular focus on evidence law, trade secret law, and data privacy.

Wexler’s scholarly theories have twice been proposed for codification into federal law and litigated in multiple courts, including a cert petition to the U.S. Supreme Court. Her Op-Eds have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Monthly, and Slate, and her work has been featured on NPR, among other media venues. 

Wexler served as senior policy advisor at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in Spring 2023, and is a visiting professor at Columbia Law School in Fall 2023.

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, Wizner 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.