Unpack and analyze the current issues and controversies concerning the First Amendment, censorship, the press, social media, and the proverbial town square.
Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Eugene Volokh is the co-founder of TheVolokh Conspiracy and one of the country’s foremost experts on the 1st Amendment and the legal issues surrounding free speech. Jane Bambauer is a distinguished professor of law and journalism at the University of Florida. On Free Speech Unmuted, Volokh and Bambauer unpack and analyze the current issues and controversies concerning the First Amendment, censorship, the press, social media, and the proverbial town square. They explain in plain English the often confusing legalese around these issues and explain how the courts and government agencies interpret the Constitution and new laws being written, passed, and decided will affect Americans' everyday lives.
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Eugene Volokh is the Thomas M. Siebel Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a professor emeritus at UCLA School of Law, where he taught First Amendment law, copyright law, criminal law, tort law, and firearms regulation policy for thirty years.
Volokh is the author of the textbooks The First Amendment and Related Statutes (8th ed. 2023) and Academic Legal Writing (5th ed. 2016), as well as more than one hundred law review articles. He is a member of the American Law Institute and of the American Heritage Dictionary Usage Panel, and the founder and coauthor of The Volokh Conspiracy, a leading legal blog. His work has been cited in more three hundred court opinions, including ten Supreme Court cases, as well as over five thousand academic articles. He has also filed briefs (mostly amicus briefs) in more than 150 cases and has argued in over thirty-five appellate cases in state and federal courts throughout the country. He hosts Free Speech Unmuted, a video podcast series sponsored by the Hoover Institution.
Before coming to UCLA, Volokh clerked for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor on the U.S. Supreme Court and for Judge Alex Kozinski on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
Volokh worked for twelve years as a computer programmer. He graduated from UCLA with a BS in math-computer science and has written many articles on computer software. Volokh was born in the Soviet Union; his family emigrated to the United States when he was seven years old.
Jane Bambauer is the Brechner Eminent Scholar and Professor of Law at the University of Florida. She has authored a textbook and dozens of law journal articles on topics related to free speech and emerging technologies. She co-founded the Journal of Free Speech Law (with Eugene and Ashutosh Bhagwat) and serves as an Executive Editor.
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