Congratulations to Lindsey Ruff – the first recipient of the Jackson Distinguished Alumni Award from the Cornell Law School First Amendment Clinic, named for Clinic Founder, Mark Jackson.
“Lindsey continues to make a real — and lasting — contribution to the work of the Cornell First Amendment Clinic and the First Amendment itself,” praised Jackson. “A true trailblazer.”
Represented by Cornell Law School First Amendment Clinic and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, freelance investigative journalist Daniel Schwartz filed a lawsuit against the Pennsylvania State Police to obtain records related to the Mariner East Pipeline protests.
Schwartz seeks intervention from the Commonwealth Court to enforce a Final Determination from the Pennsylvania Office of Open Records that ordered the Pennsylvania State Police to produce certain law enforcement officers’ communications.
The lawsuit argues that Schwartz is entitled to access to these records, which relate to a matter of significant public interest: the Mariner East pipeline protests and the interaction of police with such protests.
“I’ve seen again and again in my reporting that access to public records is essential to both inform the public and hold the government accountable,” Schwartz said. “It shouldn’t take a lawsuit to get access.”
The Pennsylvania State Police denied Schwartz access to certain records in April 2021, claiming that they did not exist. In June 2021, the Office of Open Records ordered the Pennsylvania State Police either to produce the requested records or provide an affidavit describing that it conducted an adequate search for them. Since then, the Pennsylvania State Police has failed to comply with the order.
Clinic student Steven Marzagalli, who took the lead in drafting the Petition filed with supervision from attorneys at the Clinic and the Reporters Committee, said, “I joined Cornell’s First Amendment Clinic for two reasons: the opportunity to learn from talented litigators, and to help the First Amendment bring us closer to the transparent ideals it promises. I am grateful to our client Dan for allowing me the opportunity to help him demand this transparency from the Pennsylvania State Police.”
Paula Knudsen Burke of the Reporters Committee, Associate Clinic Director Jared Carter, and Heather Murray, Managing Attorney of the Clinic’s Local Journalism Project, worked with Marzagalli on the enforcement action.
By Cornell Law School Staff
December 21, 2021
Cornell Law School’s First Amendment Clinic filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Supreme Court on December 3, 2021, arguing on behalf of media organizations that a Puerto Rico Supreme Court ruling undermines the press’s vital role in informing the public about our nation’s courts and the development of domestic violence law in particular.
Four days after the clinic filed its amicus brief, the Puerto Rico Solicitor General issued a statement agreeing that the sealed recordings should be made public. Three days later, the chief justice of the Puerto Rico Supreme Court announced a new court watch program that will permit volunteers to observe some domestic violence proceedings.[1]
The amicus brief supports a petition filed by the Yale Law School Media Freedom and Information Access clinic on behalf of the Asociación de Periodistas de Puerto Rico (the Puerto Rico Journalists Association). The petition seeks review of a high-profile domestic violence case that resulted in widespread public protests in Puerto Rico. Those protests came on the heels of the discovery of Andrea Cristina Ruiz Costas’ partially burned body and a confession by her ex-boyfriend. Shortly before her murder, Ms. Costas had unsuccessfully sought protection from Puerto Rican courts, who thrice denied her requests. When the Yale clinic sought access to the recordings of the proceedings in the trial court, the Puerto Rico Supreme Court denied access to all domestic violence proceedings and records without any opportunity to brief or argue for the right of access.
Following the solicitor general’s recent statement supporting unsealing and the chief justice’s statement announcing a court watch program, the Yale Clinic requested that the court grant certiorari (vacate the decision below), and remand with instructions to consider whether a court rule at issue, as construed by the Puerto Rico Supreme Court, violates the First Amendment right of access.
The amicus brief the Cornell clinic filed argues that the Puerto Rico Supreme Court decision’s blanket closure of civil domestic violence proceedings is out of step with the presumptive openness of the vast majority of these proceedings nationwide and with a long tradition of access to their historical counterpart, divorce proceedings.
“This decision denies the press and the public an opportunity to fulfill their essential role of holding the judiciary accountable for the failure to protect domestic violence victims. Shrouding domestic violence proceedings in secrecy would make it impossible for the public to effectively campaign for what may be much-needed legal reforms,” said Heather Murray, Managing Attorney of the Clinic’s Local Journalism Project.
“Journalists routinely rely on domestic violence records and access to judicial proceedings in their reporting. The Puerto Rico Supreme Court’s decision closing all domestic violence proceedings hampers journalists’ ability to do their jobs,” Clinic Director Mark Jackson said. Clinic students Tim Birchfield and Ashley Stamegna, Clinic Associate Director Jared Carter, Jackson, and Murray worked on the amicus effort.
If the petition is ultimately successful, journalists will win access to Puerto Rico domestic violence proceedings.
[1] The statements referenced above are annexed to the Supplemental Brief filed by the Yale Clinic on Dec. 16, 2021.
Ashley Stamegna, a student at the Cornell Law School First Amendment Clinic, argued an appeal before a panel of New York’s Appellate Division, Fourth Department on Ashley made the compelling, important case that our client, The Batavian, should have been granted access to an attorney disqualification motion in a family court matter and now should be provided a transcript of that proceeding. Ashley has been a forceful advocate for local journalism in her three semesters with our clinic. Congratulations also go to our clinic alumnus, Christopher Johnson, and current student Tim Birchfield, both of whom worked with Ashley on the brief which a Judge on the panel said in open court was “exceedingly well written”. Final congrats to Heather Murray, the Managing Attorney of our clinic’s Local Journalism Project, for supervising this important matter.
The Clinic is grateful to Bruce Brown, Executive Director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press for coming up to Ithaca this past week to address our law school and university communities on critical free speech issues of the day. Brown also gave a special presentation to our First Amendment Clinic students in their class the following day.
It is organizations like RCFP, and colleagues like Brown, who make the Clinic’s work so much more impactful and our time doing it so much more rewarding and downright enjoyable.
Days after filing an amicus brief in federal court on behalf of the Vermont Journalism Trust concerning the largest financial fraud in Vermont’s history, Cornell Law School’s First Amendment Clinic, Cornell Dolan, and the ACLU of Vermont won access to documents that had previously been sealed by the court. These documents may shine a light on the critical question of when the State of Vermont became aware of the fraud and what actions the state took in the months before the fraud became public.
The amicus brief supported a motion to unseal filed by former Jay Peak Resort President Bill Stenger after he reached a plea agreement with the federal government concerning his alleged role in an EB-5 visa investment scheme. After that fraudulent scheme was discovered, a federal agency shut down the Vermont EB-5 Regional Center that oversaw EB-5 projects, immigrant investors lost their funds and a clear path to U.S. citizenship, and Vermont residents lost out on promised job opportunities.
The State of Vermont initially opposed making the documents public, claiming that “privileges apply to them,” but, shortly after the Vermont Journalism Trust filed its amicus brief, the state agreed that the documents should be unsealed. The court ordered the unsealing of the documents on September 23, 2021. The Vermont Journalism Trust argued in its brief that these documents were of significant public interest and must be unsealed because the First Amendment and common law rights of access applied to them.
Heather Murray
“We recognize the tremendous importance of the release of these documents to the public,” says Heather Murray, managing attorney of the Local Journalism Project at the Cornell First Amendment Clinic. “Our clinic is thrilled that we could assist VTDigger in its excellent investigative reporting on this major financial fraud.”
Associate Clinic Director Jared Carter and law students Alyssa Ertel, Andrew Gelfand, Lauren Kazen, and Victoria Martin provided critical assistance in preparing the brief.
Since 2012, the Vermont Journalism Trust, operating as VTDigger, has been reporting on the state’s lax oversight of the EB-5 Immigrant Investor Visa Program, a federal program designed to create jobs and stimulate foreign capital investment in low-income regions.
“The EB-5 scandal shows the need for more transparency and government accountability, and that is exactly why we’ve been fighting for access to these and other EB-5 documents for the past several years,” says Lia Ernst, legal director of the ACLU of Vermont.
The EB-5 program allows foreign entrepreneurs who make specified financial investments in the United States to apply for lawful permanent resident status. In April 2016, the state and the federal Securities Exchange Commission filed civil suits against several individuals and corporate entities alleged to have misused, in a “Ponzi-like” scheme, more than $200 million of these investor funds marked for projects in Vermont.
“This is the fourth case we’ve been involved in seeking access to EB-5 records that shed light on the government’s oversight of these projects and its actions once it became aware of the fraud,” says Timothy Cornell of Cornell Dolan. “Today marks a significant victory in the pursuit of truth for both our client and the public, but these actions should not be necessary for the public to learn what their government did.”
The First Amendment Clinics at Cornell Law School and Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law secured access last week to in-person interviews with the incarcerated civil rights leader Jamil Al-Amin, formerly H. Rap Brown, on behalf of scholar and journalist Arun Kundnani. Prior to the clinics’ involvement, Kundnani had made three separate unsuccessful interview requests to the former warden of the Federal Correctional Complex in Tucson, Arizona, where Al-Amin is housed. The former warden denied access to Al-Amin in part based on his determination that an interview with the nearly blind septuagenarian would purportedly reelevate his status at the prison and disturb the good order of the institution.
Al-Amin played a leading role in the civil rights movement in the 1960s as the fifth chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. In 2002, he was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for the killing of a sheriff’s deputy in Atlanta. Al-Amin and his supporters continue to maintain his innocence.
Kundnani sought interviews with Al-Amin to complete his research for a book chronicling Al-Amin’s life. Without access to Al-Amin, there would have been a substantial risk that major events pertaining to his civil rights work, including his activities during a nineteen-month period when he operated in secret, would never be recorded.
After the clinics demanded access on First Amendment grounds and promised to pursue legal action if the renewed request was denied, a new warden granted Kundnani telephone and video interview access to Mr. Al-Amin this spring and in-person access this summer.
“I cannot convey how grateful I am for the work the clinics did to make this happen,” Kundnani said. “The interviews were fantastically useful, and I feel like, with the earlier phone calls, I’ve now had sufficient access with Jamil Al-Amin to do justice to his story.”
Kundnani is the author of The End of Tolerance: Racism in 21st Century Britain and The Muslims are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror. His book on Al-Amin aims to explore the life of the former chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, including his activism, convictions, and the governmental institutions that surveilled him.
“We are thrilled that our clinic students could assist Dr. Kundnani in his work on one of the great untold stories of the civil rights era,” said Heather Murray, Managing Attorney of the Cornell Clinic’s Local Journalism Project. “Too often prison officials around the country deny requests to prisoner interviews arbitrarily. We are pleased that Warden Catricia Howard chose to reverse the prior denials after we renewed Dr. Kundnani’s request.”
“Cases like this concerning matters of great public interest and concern demonstrate why access to prisoners is so important,” said ASU Clinic Director Gregg Leslie. “And journalists need access not only to interview prominent prisoners, but also to cover, for example, the conditions of confinement during COVID-19 outbreaks and the effectiveness of their rehabilitative programs. Dr. Kundnani’s story about Mr. Al-Amin’s life will be an important work that never should have been thwarted because previous prison officials were not willing to let a prisoner talk.”
Cornell Law students Salvadore J. Diaz, Steven Marzagalli, and Jamie Smith and ASU students Parker Jackson and Priyal Thakker worked on this effort. Former Cornell Clinic Associate Director Cortelyou Kenney and former ASU Fellow Laura Layton supervised the students’ work alongside Leslie and Murray.
The Cornell Law School First Amendment Clinic is excited to announce that it has initiated a pilot program with Cornell Law School’s Entrepreneurship Clinic – a very popular clinic at Cornell which provides corporate services to emerging enterprises.
For this pilot, the First Amendment Clinic has brought to the Cornell Entrepreneurship Clinic two of its representative media clients in need of more “foundational” legal services ─ one based in New York City and the other in Phoenix, Arizona, each with different legal challenges. The concept is that these two clients will be represented by a team of students from both clinics, supervised by the Director of the Entrepreneurship Clinic (Celia Bigoness) and the Managing Attorney of the First Amendment Clinic’s Local Journalism Project (Heather Murray) and the First Amendment Clinic’s NYC-based Local Journalism Attorney (Ava Lubell).
The purpose of this program is to meet our clients precisely where their needs are and to provide to them a more fulsome representation, more in line with the type of work an in-house lawyer would perform for a media outlet. The program is also intended to provide our students with a more holistic perspective of a media lawyer who is asked to perform all manner of legal services for their clients.
According to Clinic Director Mark Jackson: “our view is that in order to be an effective media attorney, a lawyer needs to be acquainted and adept at both litigation and corporate skills.” Jackson added “a good litigator understands their clients’ commercial needs and that a good corporate attorney understands the newsgathering challenges of their clients.”
Cornell Law School’s First Amendment Clinic filed a lawsuit in state court on August 18, 2021, on behalf of veteran New York journalist Janon Fisher seeking records from the New York City’s Office of the Mayor containing information about the qualifications of judicial nominees seeking appointment to influential court seats.
Candidates wishing to be considered for appointment to family, criminal, and civil courts must submit a job application in the form of a completed Uniform Judicial Questionnaire ( to the Mayor’s Advisory Committee on The Judiciary (“MACJ”). The Questionnaire solicits information directly from candidates that is crucial to determining an aspiring judge’s qualifications and includes questions regarding a candidate’s educational attainment, litigation background, client representations, areas of substantive legal expertise, executive experience, and more.
“Transparency is a fundamental feature of democracy and, in particular, the civil and criminal court system. Knowing who sits in judgment of us is crucial to the credibility of our courts,” said Fisher. “When so much about the criminal justice system is being questioned and rethought, the public has the right to know who Mayor de Blasio’s is nominating to the bench and what makes them qualified or unqualified to impartially dispense justice,” he added.
“Janon’s knowledge of New York government is mind-bogglingly comprehensive. He has consistently devoted time and energy to understanding the city’s frustratingly opaque judicial appointment process and we’re so honored to support him in his efforts” says Ava Lubell, Local Journalism Attorney and part of the clinic’s Local Journalism Project.”Understanding the appointment process is crucial to maintaining the public’s trust in the judiciary,” added Lubell. “The public must know more about the MACJ operates and who their finalist candidates for appointment are.”
Fisher is represented by Lubell and Heather Murray, managing attorney of the Clinic’s Local Journalism Project.
The First Amendment Clinic is engaged in a variety of cases and projects advancing the interests of free speech and freedom of the press. The Local Journalism Project addresses the increasing void in legal representation facing newsgatherers and media outlets that would otherwise be precluded from engaging in expensive litigation to defend their rights and ability to do their jobs. The Clinic’s work extends across disciplines, impacting journalists, researchers, human rights advocates, political advocates, and other individuals targeted based on their expression.
Congratulations to Clinic Fellow Tyler Valeska for his publication of of “A Press Clause Right to Cover Protests” in Wash U Law’s Journal of Law & Policy. Read it here.