Before attending law school at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law, Professor RonNell Andersen Jones earned a bachelor’s degree in communications and worked as a journalist.
“My interests in freedom of expression, the rights of newsgatherers, and the role of the press in healthy communities goes back to even the time before my earliest training in the law,” she recalls. “I’ve seen firsthand both the ways that good journalism can build an important civic core for a community and the harms that many people fear from irresponsible media. The tensions at stake in these dynamics have fascinated me from the beginning.”
Pressing forward in First Amendment research
Now in her ninth year of teaching at Utah Law (she previously taught at both BYU’s J. Reuben Clark Law School and the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law), Andersen Jones focuses her research on the role of the press in American democracy. She says the importance of identifying and protecting a healthy press has become more urgent over time.
“There is a really complex and overlapping set of threats facing the American press today—economic, political, technological, and social. The Founders knew that protection for the press was going to be key to keeping our system of self-government. They protected it specifically in the First Amendment, separate and apart from the freedom of speech that we all enjoy,” Andersen Jones says. “As a scholar, I’m committed to thinking about what this means for us in the modern era, when both the press and our government have changed in huge ways but the underlying need for a healthy news ecosystem is stronger than ever.”
One of the most challenging aspects of First Amendment law is that much of the Supreme Court doctrine and commentary came when the press was more readily identifiable.
“The mid-20th century media that gave rise to much of our legal thinking in this area looked very different from the news landscape we have today. Some have argued that it is a terrible moment for trying to identify and protect the press because it is just too difficult to define who the press is,” Andersen Jones explains. “I think the exact opposite is true—that we have to work especially hard, right now, to develop doctrine that guarantees that even in a changing media environment, we have the legal and constitutional conditions for a trustworthy, healthy, vibrant press that is independent from the government and free to act as a watchdog over it.”
As the press takes various forms over time, Andersen Jones says we need to carefully theorize its functions, which the Constitution’s authors wanted us to protect.
“We can build doctrine that will be nimble enough to adapt to technological change and protect whoever is actually performing those functions so they can act in ways that benefit all of us,” she says.
Andersen Jones is the editor of a new book, “The Future of Press Freedom: Democracy, Law and the News in Changing Times” with Professor Sonja R. West of the University of Georgia. She and West coordinated essays from more than two dozen top scholars and will be discussing the book March 4 from 12-1:30 p.m. on Zoom.
“A primary goal of the project was to bring together great thinkers whose past work has not necessarily been directly about press freedom so they could add their adjacent expertise. Professor West and I bring to the book a collective half-century of scholarship about the role of newsgathering in a healthy democracy, but we learned so much from having brilliant scholars who specialize in national security, executive power, constitutional law, history, democratic theory, and media economics join the effort,” Andersen Jones says.
She notes that she and co-editor West were “absolutely delighted” at the prestigious voices they were able to assemble for the book.
“The deans or former deans of Harvard, Yale, and Berkeley law schools, former U.S. Supreme Court clerks, and some of the top journalism educators in the country were all at the table for this. It’s a real testament to the urgency of the conversation,” she explains.
While Andersen Jones says it’s a privilege to devote her professional life to tussling with hard questions about press freedom, she is proud that she and West have given the conversation a platform.
“This field was quite small and underdeveloped when we arrived on the scene, and it is heartening to see so many public-interest groups, courts, scholars, and advocates now giving so much more careful attention to freedom of the press,” she says. “The problems are not solved, but there are many great minds working toward solutions, and that’s comforting to me.”
Completing more press-focused research and writing projects
Professor Andersen Jones has a number of new projects in the work, all focused on the intersections between law and media and identifying and protecting democracy-enhancing press functions.
“My next major paper explores what the U.S. Supreme Court has said about the country’s history and tradition of press freedom. I am also researching and writing about the growing trend of public officials bringing defamation suits against news organizations and the ways governmental and private pressures can combine to impact the independence of the press,” she says.
Teaching at Utah Law is also rewarding because of the intimacy of its small size.
“We are able to develop much deeper intellectual relationships with our students and nurture much more collaborative connections between our teaching and our research than are possible at other schools,” Andersen Jones says. “The students who study constitutional law with me and enroll in my First Amendment seminars aren’t just passive recipients of material about the law. They’re active participants in research on the most important issues of our time. We are all benefiting from each other.”