Wednesday, Sept. 30
12:50 pm | UC Berkeley Law, Room 170
Lunch provided. RSVP required.
The federal government is restricting journalists’ access to the Pentagon. Congress has moved to defund NPR and PBS. Defamation threats are being wielded to silence critical reporting. In this session, three of the country’s leading First Amendment litigators will discuss the cases they are actively fighting, the legal strategies they are deploying, and what these battles mean for the future of a free press.
Panelists:
Katie Townsend, Partner, Gibson Dunn
Katie Fallow, Deputy Litigation Director, Knight First Amendment Institute
Matthew Cate, media and First Amendment lawyer at the Law Office of Matthew S.L. Cate
Moderated by:
Jonathan D. Glater, Professor, UC Berkeley Law
From top left, clockwise: Katie Fallow, Katie Townsend, Jonathan Glater and Matthew Cate.
About the speakers:
Katie Fallow is the deputy litigation director at the Knight First Amendment Institute, where she focuses on threats to free speech and a free press in the digital age, particularly in the area of social media. Fallow was previously a litigation partner at Jenner & Block, LLP and deputy director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection at the Federal Trade Commission.
Katie Townsend is a partner in the Los Angeles office of Gibson Dunn, advising clients in the media, entertainment and technology industries. She previously served as the deputy executive director and legal director at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, where she oversaw the organization’s legal services portfolio. She was a co-recipient of the 1999 Courage in Student Journalism Award for successfully fighting her school board’s plans to crack down on student press rights.
Matthew Cate: Before becoming a lawyer, Cate was a reporter for the Chattanooga Times Free Press and the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, primarily covering government and politics. His journalism career began as a member of the student press, producing and editing features for the daily news broadcast of Jefferson County High School in Dandridge, Tenn.) daily news broadcast. And his first byline appeared in The Daily Beacon, the independent student newspaper of University of Tennessee.
Jonathan Glater joined the Berkeley Law faculty in 2021. His research has focused on the ways that law promotes and limits access to education, especially higher education, and the impact that education debt has on educational opportunities. Glater is a faculty director of the Center on Consumer Law and Economic Justice at Berkeley Law. With Dalié Jiménez, he is also co-founder and co-director of the Student Loan Law Initiative, an interdisciplinary partnership with the nonprofit organization Protect Borrowers, devoted to study of the effects of student debt. In 2023 he was named a member of the California Civil Rights Council, a volunteer body tasked with developing regulations that implement California’s civil rights laws.
Sponsored by:
