Justice Thomas, the First Amendment & Media Freedoms - A CLE Webinar 

CLE NOTE - This event does NOT qualify for CLE credit
Justice Clarence Thomas, the longest-serving Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, has in recent years expressed idiosyncratic views on some key First Amendment issues. He has gained particular attention for staking out bold new positions on the free-speech treatment of both the press and social media. Justice Thomas urged, in one instance, that the Court reconsider the watershed media-law case of New York Times v. Sullivan, which interprets the First Amendment to make it difficult for public officials to bring libel suits and suggested, in another, that the Court should adjust its constitutional free-speech approach to take into account potential censorship within the highly concentrated, privately owned information infrastructure of digital platforms. In this webinar, media law experts RonNell Andersen Jones and Jeffrey Hunt explore the contours of Justice Thomas’s views, considering their origins, their place within the Justice’s wider jurisprudence, and their likelihood of gaining traction with the fuller Court.
Panelists:
Jeff Hunt, Shareholder, Parr Brown Gee & Loveless
RonNell Andersen Jones, Lee E. Teitelbaum Endowed Professor of Law, University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law