Interested in how the Freedom of Information Act and other Open Records laws help shine light on government, or how classified materials become publicly available? Join us for a panel on the Freedom of Information Act where UGA experts will share tips for submitting an open records request, talk about their own experience working with these laws across states/jurisdictions, and more.
Panelists:
Charles Davis
Charles N. Davis has served as Dean of the Henry W. Grady School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia since 2013. He spent the previous 14 years as a professor at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, including a five-year appointment as executive director of the National Freedom of Information Coalition and 12 years as director of the FOI Center at the school. In that role, he assisted journalists and citizens alike with thousands of public records requests at the state and federal level.
Prior to academia, Davis worked for ten years as a journalist after his graduation from North Georgia College, working for newspapers, magazines and a news service in Georgia and Florida, during which he completed a master’s degree from the University of Georgia's Henry W. Grady School of Journalism and Mass Communication. He went on to earn a doctorate in mass communication from the University of Florida.
His teaching awards include the Scripps Howard Foundation National Journalism Teacher of the Year Award in 2008, the Provost’s Award for Junior Faculty Teaching in 2001, and the University of Missouri Alumni Association’s Faculty/Alumni Award in 2008.
Clare Norins
Clare Norins is an assistant clinical professor and director of the University of Georgia School of Law's First Amendment Clinic where she represents clients in federal and state court on a range of First Amendment and media law issues. Previously in private practice, she specialized in constitutional litigation, focusing on issues of policing and employment discrimination. She also served as an assistant attorney general for the State of New. Immediately prior to joining the law school faculty, Norins was assistant director of UGA’s Equal Opportunity Office. She is a graduate of the School of Law at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and a board member of the Georgia First Amendment Foundation.
Jon Peters
Jonathan Peters is a media law professor at the University of Georgia, where he is the head of the Department of Journalism and an affiliate faculty member in the School of Law. His research focuses on media law and has appeared in journals published by the law schools at Berkeley, Harvard, NYU, Virginia, and North Carolina, among others. He is a coauthor of the book The Law of Public Communication, and by invitation he has blogged about the First Amendment for the Harvard Law Review. Peters is a frequent commentator on media law issues for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Vanity Fair, CNN, NBC, CBS, and NPR. He has been a consultant on press rights for the U.N. Development Programme, and he is a member of the OSCE-ODIHR Panel of Experts on Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and Association, which is part of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe and its Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights. Peters is the vice president of the Georgia First Amendment Foundation's board of directors.