![handle is hein.journals/mdilwnts39 and id is 1 raw text is: Head Notes
Amy Gajda
Division Head
Tulane Law School
My library contains a great old book,
Law of the Press, authored by William Hale
and Ivan Benson, and published by West
Publishing in
1933. Hale
was dean of
the law school
and Benson
was an associ-
ate professor
of journalism
at the Univer-
sity of South-
ern California
at the time this
second edition
was published.
Hale authored the m e a
rst edition alone
in 1923.
The 600-page book covers libel, privacy,
contempt, copyright, and contracts. But to
me, one of its most intriguing parts comes
not in its legal analysis but in its preface.
The three short paragraphs suggest in part
that collaboration with a trained journalist
[had] brought about a careful revision of
the book. The journalism professor Benson,
seemingly, had offered a helpful perspec-
tive that Hale apparently recognized had
been lacking in the earlier work.
Perhaps Hale intended his collaboration
phrase to be taken in a different way, but
it says to me a law scholar was expressing
the importance of a journalistic perspective
in any law of the press analysis. Some-
how, sadly, that sentiment has not caught on
in any sort of uniform fashion.
Frequently, I've given talks to a legal audi-
ence -judges, lawyers, and law professors
- and heard the same complaints: journal-
ism is out of control, ethics have fallen by
the wayside, something must be done to
rein in journalists. I've tried to explain that
ethics still matter to most journalists, that
many of the proffered examples were based
on Internet posts and not traditional jour-
nalism, that journalism, though admittedly
feeling pressured by what was happening
online, held fast to ethics provisions. Un-
fortunately, I have also read many opinions
in which courts write things that seem sur-
prisingly out of touch with what really hap-
pens in the process of journalism.
I'm not sure how we got here and why law
distrusts journalism so much. There is, of
course, a rich tradition of wariness. When
Warren and Brandeis wrote The Right to
Privacy, for example, they weren't spurred
on by the transgressions of private detec-
tives or of peeping toms. They felt that
JOURNALISM was out of control and that
something needed to be done about it. More
than 100 years later, in my experience, the
bench and bar have the same complaints.
How can we reach those who don't under-
stand precisely how journalism works and
yet have the future of freedom of the press
in their hands? I think that the answer is us.
Just as Hale suggested in his preface in
1933, journalists who know the law or
those lawyers who know intimately about
the practice of journalism have much to of-
fer media law and legal analysis. Imagine,
for example, attempting to understand why
a doctor made a certain medical decision-
without truly understanding how medicine
is supposed to work.
Take journalism's ethics codes as one ex-
ample: Those who know journalism under-
stand that the provisions are not hard
(continued on page 2)
Award-winning
teaching idea
draws criticism
By Jim Sernoe, winner,
2010 Best Ideas in the
Teaching of Communication Law
and Policy Competition
Winning the Law & Policy Division's
award for teaching ideas was the cap
to a two-year adventure with the First
Amendment Project. The goal of the First
Amendment Project is for students to mea-
sure tolerance of free expression through an
experiment of their design. The goal is to
engage in legal forms of expression with-
out getting arrested or starting a riot. When
I started the project, I knew I would be
pushing the envelope but did not expect
quite the level of reaction that followed.
For Spring 2009, the students ended up in
two groups, one that arranged a protest of a
proposed ban on smoking on campus and
one that arranged a sale of cookies in vulgar
shapes and with vulgar sayings.
One student objected to the concept and
proposed selling cookies with biblical say-
ings on them. This put a wrinkle in the rest
of the students' plans, but it also forced
them to work with someone whose views
differed from their own. If they really be-
lieved in the First Amendment, I repeated,
they had to work with the students sincere
beliefs; they rose to the occasion by work-
ing out several logistical kinks. Each group
would have a table in the Student Center, at
opposite ends of the hall, with 100 identi-
cally priced cookies for sale.
Not everyone on campus was amused, as
a dean went to the provost, and his wife,
an adjunct instructor, went to the president.
Another administrator expressed his disap-
proval to the students directly, while anoth-
er mover and shaker on campus called me
directly. An outraged parent, whose child
happened to be on campus for a eld trip,
also called me.
(continued on page 2)
MEDIA LAW NOTES
VOLUME 39, NO. 1 LAW AND POLICY DIVISION, AEJMC FALL 2010](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/mdilwnts39&div=1&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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