The Clinic vigorously defends its clients’ free speech rights, across the political spectrum, to achieve the best results possible for those clients. The First Amendment Clinic provides students the opportunity to work on cases that involve freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of assembly and the right to petition by working on cutting-edge litigation, advocacy, and policy work, often across interdisciplinary fields.
The Clinic’s work falls generally into two overlapping buckets: free press cases pursued on behalf of local journalists and media outlets as part of our Local Journalism Project; and free speech cases that extend across disciplines, impacting the work of those targeted based on their expression.
The Clinic’s recent work is featured below. Click here to see more matters.
LOCAL GOVERNMENT PROJECT
The Local Government Project is a new initiative within Cornell’s First Amendment Clinic that examines how democratic values—especially free expression—are functioning at the local level. The project’s initial focus is on school boards across New York State, collecting and analyzing their policies and practices to assess how effectively they support open, democratic governance. When gaps or outliers are identified, the Clinic aims to address them directly—either by helping institutions improve their policies or, when necessary , by pursuing litigation.
WHY THIS WORK, WHY NOW?
The Local Government Project grew out of a pattern of matters handled by the Clinic in recent years in which clients complained about being restricted in their ability to participate in their local governments. One client, for example, was asked before joining a school board committee to sign a document agreeing to only speak positively about the committee’s work. Another set of clients were dismissed from a police oversight committee for statements they made publicly criticizing recent police activity. (In each of these matters, the Clinic was able to help resolve the Frist Amendment violation without resorting to litigation by communicating and negotiating directly with the relevant governmental body.) Clinic Director Mark H. Jackson describes it as “a distinct and disturbing trend by local governmental bodies like city, county and town councils, school boards and other citizens committees, to enact policies or take specific actions that either deny citizens insight into their representative bodies or inhibit the free and full participation of citizens in the working of their public institutions.”
These troubling policies and practices tend to fall into two categories. Some limit transparency—closing deliberations that should be public, restricting the recording or livestreaming of meetings, or delaying and denying access to public records. Others limit participation—narrowing or eliminating public comment periods, barring speakers from criticizing officials by name, or removing residents from meetings because of the views they express. Any one of these may look like a procedural choice. Taken together, they erode the public’s ability to see and shape the decisions made in its name.
MEASURING DEMOCRACY, ONE SCHOOL BOARD AT A TIME
School boards stood out. Few local bodies draw as much public attention, and few have seen as many disputes over who may speak, what they may say, and how much the public may see. In addition to handling individual matters as they arise, the Clinic decided to examine the landscape more systematically. With generous support from the Henry Luce Foundation, the Clinic created the Local Government Project to help ensure that school board policies and practices are consistent with First Amendment principles.
The project enables a systematic, data-driven review of this critical layer of local government. We collect school board policies and practices in New York State, assess how aligned they are with free-speech principles, and determine whether their practices match their policies. When we find outliers, we attempt to fix them either through advocacy and community conversation or, if necessary, through litigation. School boards serve as a fulcrum for the project because they have become a central arena for contemporary free speech debates. Over time, the initiative intends to expand to examine other areas of local government.
Central to this project are two important themes: first, an intention to use the research and insights to spark a conversation with local governments and communities on how to improve public participation and access to the inner workings of local governments. It seeks to educate and empower local citizens to be active participants in their own communities; and second, the effort is, by definition, non-partisan, defending the rights of citizens across the political spectrum to have a say in their local affairs.
The research and analysis of the Local Government Project will culminate in a public report assessing how well this “slice” of local government is functioning—and how it can be improved. It will recommend how the work of this project can be expanded to examine and improve the functioning of other local governmental bodies.
Another key feature of the project is its interdisciplinary collaboration with the Democracy Project at the Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy, which focuses on strengthening democracy globally through rigorous research, education and advocacy. Clinic faculty will be working alongside professors and researchers at the Brooks School to both collect and analyze the data related to school board policies and practices. This partnership is now part of a broader cross-university effort—The Cornell Center on Democracy—which seeks to study and strengthen democratic practices in the United States and throughout the world, combining legal advocacy with empirical research.