Courses | Columbia Law School

This seminar will examine ways in which issues in law, media, journalism and the production of knowledge are intertwined. First, we will look at traditional issues involving academic freedom, propaganda, intellectual property, speech/conduct codes, and the ethics of publication. Secondly, we will compare the rhetorical conventions of law and journalism, looking at legal and journalistic accounts of the same debates. We will also look at the tension between privacy and publicity; issues of personal perspective, the responsibilities of representation, the complexities of truth-telling, the ethics of fairness. Thirdly, we will look at larger public policy interests, such as concentration of media ownership, terms of service and ownership of online data, meta-discourses of money as speech, embedded journalism, data-aggregation, surveillance, and the commerce of news in tension with the notion of a "free" press.