 Thank you everyone so much for joining us. This is an event brought to you by IFRA, the Initiative for Representative First Amendment on First Amendment Careers. And to talk about First Amendment Careers, we have this like incredible lineup, which I'm very thrilled to moderate. I should say who I am. My name is Kendra Albert. I'm the Director of the Initiative for Representative First Amendment and a Clinical Instructor at the Cyber Lock Clinic at Harvard. So first I'm gonna introduce our fantastic panelists. And then I'm in TSF with some questions about what they do now, how they've gotten to what they are doing, advice that they might have for students who are interested in doing First Amendment work. And then hopefully we'll have a little bit of time at the end to make sure that we get questions from all of y'all. But let's get started. So I'm gonna introduce our panelists in no particular order. So our first panelist is Minou Christian. Christian, sorry about that. I practiced beforehand. Minou is currently an associate at Davis Wright-Tremaine, where she counsels and defends media and technology clients in First Amendment, copyright, news gathering, not trademark, and defamation matters. The reason I say not trademark is because we had a joke beforehand about whether Minou was doing trademark, not because I wouldn't trust Minou without my trademark matters. I wouldn't. Her experience includes researching and litigating significant issues surrounding First Free Expression, privacy, and FOIA. Prior to joining Davis Wright-Tremaine, Minou worked as a legal fellow at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, which received a couple different shout-outs, I suspect, during our panel today. She received JD from Yale Law School, which some people may have heard of, and clerked for the honorable James Wynne Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. So thank you, Minou, for being with us for super thrilled to have you. Our next panelist, who I'm just so excited about, not the least of which group has won one of her two amazing events today, is Nora Benavides. Nora is the senior counsel and director for Digital Justice and Civil Rights at Free Press. It's a big job, and I know she's definitely up for it, where she manages the organization's efforts around platform and media accountability to defend against digital threats to democracy. She previously served as the director of Penn America's U.S. Freedom of Expression programs and worked in both private practice and at the ACLU of Georgia. And she graduated from the Emory University School of Law and received her BA from NYU. So thank you so much, Nora, for joining us. Our next guest is Summer Ingram Dean, who is a former journalist, licensed attorney, and the Fred Hartman Distinguished Professor at Baylor University. She also serves as an attorney at the Student Press Law Center. Summer's areas of interest and expertise are media law and ethics issues, including freedom of speech, media freedom, and access to information. She holds a BA in political science from Baylor University and then JD from Georgetown University Law Center. Welcome, Summer, we're so thrilled to have you. And then finally, certainly last, the last but certainly not least is Alyssa Morones, who's a legal fellow at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. She received her JD from the UCLA School of Law in May, 2021, where she helped draft and submit amicus briefs to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and New York Supreme Court. Is that New York Supreme Court is in the highest court in New York and New York Supreme Court is in the second one up. The second one up, yeah. Okay. One of my most, my favorite, confusing legal trivia factoids. For those not in the know, Supreme Court in New York is not, in fact, supreme, it's the second highest court. Anyway, this is all to get an aside to Alyssa's bio. It happens, I get distracted. Those are all as members of the First Amendment Amicus Clinic. During law school, Morones was a fellow with the initiative for a representative First Amendment, which is how I got to know her and entered at the Cornell First Amendment Clinic and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and she received her BA in political science from the University of Notre Dame. So thank you, Alyssa, for joining us today. So this is an amazing all-star panel and I'm gonna start with the most basic question that I can think of to talk about career-wise, which is what is your current job? I may have already covered that in the bio, but I'm most interested in asking folks what a typical day looks like for that. Is it client calls? Is it solo research and writing? Is it coalition work? Is it being on Zoom panels? What are your typical days like? And maybe we'll start with, maybe I'll just call in some folks. So okay, why don't we start with Summer and then we'll go to Minu, Nora and then Alyssa, if that's okay. Sure, well, thank you for having me. It's nice to be here. So some of you may not have heard of my organization. It's called the Student Press Law Center or SPLC for short. We are a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C. and really our sole mission is to help educate and empower student journalists. So as an attorney there, my main role is to run our hotline. And so that's free legal assistance for student journalists or student media advisors, both at the high school and college level from all around the country. We help with things as simple as you want to know a student or illness wants to know if they can run a photo in their newspaper without permission. And the answer is normally no. We help with more complicated matters of censorship. Again, that's both at the high school and college levels. Any sort of media law issue you can think of that professional journalists face, student journalists also face as well, plus the added pressures and challenges of censorship from school officials. So a typical day for me may look like monitoring our hotline, making sure sometimes we have really pressing issues that come in. Someone who is trying to send their paper to print and their principal won't let them. And so that could involve acting really quickly on multiple fronts. So both counseling the students, putting together resources for them so that they can know what their rights are, perhaps putting together a letter with a coalition of other free speech and free expression nationwide organizations to send to the school. Really sort of a myriad of things, getting in touch with local media to cover the story. So I spend a lot of my day talking to student journalists from all over the place. It's a lot of fun. Like I said, we handle all sorts of different questions and things that may come in. I also do a lot of training. So our organization has a program where you can book myself or another member of our legal team to come into the classroom and train student journalists on things like libel. So how not to get sued, copyright law, how to use open records laws in their reporting. What to do if you're planning to cover a protest, things that you should think about when it comes to that. So it's a lot of fun. And additionally, I'm also a professor in the journalism school at Baylor where I teach law and ethics. And so again, just working a lot with students that classes were majors in the department. And so really my passion is around working with young people and making sure they understand what their rights are as they enter this field. Amazing, thank you. And I have sort of this wonderful mental image of some young person calling you as they're still literal printing press. I don't know if their little printing press is involved anymore. And they're like, the principal is trying to stop it. And you're like, we got this. They're like running away with the phone. The principal is trying to catch me. Please don't disabuse me of the notion that that's what you do today. That is exactly what I do. Perfect, thank you. Fantastic. Me, no, I think I suggested you would go next. So we'd love to hear what is your, yeah, what is the typical day or what are the kinds of things that you do day to day look like, David's right for me. Sure, yeah. And thank you for having me. I really wish I had known about the SPLC when I, because I did college journalism and we were doing some crazy stuff. So I really wish I could have called that help line. But yeah, so as Kendra said, I'm an associate in the media and first amendment practice at Davis Wright Tremaine. Most of my work focuses on defending and protecting primarily journalists, news organizations and nonprofits in their reporting and commentary. So what I like is that I'm involved at kind of the entire life cycle of a story or report that covers everything from pre-publication counseling on news gathering issues or copyright issues, then actually substantive vetting of articles and broadcasts. And then if a lawsuit or a threat of a lawsuit results after publication, responding to retraction requests or actually defending in a lawsuit. And then I also do some plaintiff side work for journalists, most often in public records cases, as well as amicus briefs work for all kinds of clients. For example, earlier this year I wrote an amicus brief on behalf of the Brennan Center in support of a cert petition that the ACLU, the media freedom clinic at Yale and Knight Institute filed seeking a first amendment right of access to opinions of the foreign intelligence surveillance court. So all sorts of things. So as you might expect, not one typical day, but every day my day is pretty evenly split, I think among litigation, pre-publication review and pro bono work, which is typically a mix of both. So, on the litigation side, that means like really being a lawyer, which is something I've learned in this job, which is can be anything from drafting discovery responses, reviewing documents produced in discovery, drafting a brief, preparing a deposition outline, responding to a subpoena that's been issued against a journalist, or even negotiating with an AUSA in a FOIA case. And it's something that this job has really opened up a whole world for me is the vetting world. And that is something that I have come to just adore. So I think it lets me relive my fantasies of being a journalist. But I get to read news articles or features, as I mentioned, before they go to print. And lately I'm starting to do more TV and broadcast work, which is really cool. And even in the pro bono space, doing things like human rights reports and that sort of thing. So basically what I'm doing is vetting for defamation risk and working with the reporters and the scholars, the academic, what have you very closely to make sure that that is minimized. And as one of my mentors, the firm says, not to prevent a lawsuit, but to make sure we're in a good position that if a lawsuit comes, we can stand by the reporting. I think that's the broad overview. I'm sure we can get into some more specifics later, but don't want to take up too much time right now. No, that's perfect. And I love what you said about not preventing a lawsuit, because I think one of the things that you realize when you are doing sort of pre-publication review or any type of like pre-litigation defense that stuff is like, nothing you do can necessarily keep someone from suing you, right? Like it's like sometimes you have clients who are like, can I get sued for this? And like, unfortunately, the answer is always yes, because that's not how the US legal system is meant to work, but reducing the potential risk of that lawsuit being successful is a big part of the job. So thank you so much. Nora, I think you're up next. I'm very excited to hear about what you're up to on a day-to-day basis. Oh, well, first it's wonderful to be here with all of you and it means so much to me. I want to be invited to also see that there is ASL interpretation. I just want to acknowledge that. I think that the more in this digital and surreal digital space, we can provide more equity and access. That's wonderful. So I'm done with my stump speech soapbox, but what are my days like? Kendra, I hope it's not anticlimactic. My days are currently pretty different from each other, but over the course of my career, I've done pretty much everything, I think. I started out as a litigator and worked on policy issues at the ACLU of Georgia. I then went into private practice in Georgia, which is not uncommon when you are a constitutional and civil rights lawyer. There's a wonderful and rich community of constitutional litigators in Georgia. And so I got to work with many of them. And during that period of my Georgia civil rights days, I was going to court all the time. I was attending legislative hearings. I was meeting with clients, going to depositions, all of the kinds of things that you imagine, like the TV image of an exciting legal career in the courtroom, that was my life then, in the South, of course. And so that meant that I also got to attend protests and advise people on their rights. Some of it was wonderful hearing about your work now. I have sort of this fondness for First Amendment trainings, know your rights trainings. I went all over rural parts of Georgia, other parts of Georgia, that frankly, being a Los Angeles Latina, I had never experienced before. And so that was really like very deeply enmeshed in community. Over the years then, as I have moved more into legislative policy work and sort of the higher national narrative problems regarding free speech, I'm not in court. And despite having been the lead at Pan America for our lawsuit against Donald Trump for his retaliation of the press, I really was never in court again actually, not to sound dramatic, but that's something I miss. Maybe one day I will come back to it. I did really love litigating, but now I do a number of different things. There's still kind of a core research and writing component, but I get to do a lot more interfacing with other experts thinking about like, what is the future of democracy and what does that look like? And so I mostly attend a lot of meetings. I wanna be very real with all of you who are here. Like I look at my Microsoft Outlook, which now gives a tally of the hours you spend on Zoom or in meetings and I have like nine hours a day of meetings where they're coalition meetings, they're meetings with the Department of Justice or another federal agency, they're meetings with an individual at the federal level who might be thinking about some kind of interesting and what I would push for policy around civil rights and digital rights. So my job now, instead of working my way here, I will just say my job now is I get to do pretty much whatever. I oversee our digital justice and civil rights work at Free Press, which means I work on platform accountability all of the ways that what happens online has very real world consequences, which is something that we have learned, I think now in very acute ways over the last several months. And I think that it's really the frontier for our free speech discussions. So I get to look at policies, I get to draft legislation and it's a lot of fun. Like I don't want that to get lost because I feel so lucky that I love my job so much. And when you guys invited me to speak here, that was the number one thing I was excited to talk about is just that lawyering can be so rewarding and very stressful, but really fun. So I'll close with my opening there. I love that. And I also think that, you know, after describing spending nine hours a day in meetings potentially on Zoom or God forbid Microsoft Teams, closing by being like this job is really fun is sort of a necessary like an important and necessary reminder. Yeah, thank you so much for that. Alyssa, yeah, I'd love to hear about what a typical day is looking like for you. Yeah, for sure. And thank you again for having me here. So I'm currently a legal fellow at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia. And the Knight Institute focuses on free speech and freedom of the press, especially in light of the shifting digital landscape. So a lot of the litigation has to do with preserving privacy online, protecting online discourse and thinking about how that can be protected in a way that fosters, I guess, good discourse and equal access to speech. And also litigation focused on government accountability. So asking the government for records for various things. So my, similar to a lot of other people here, I don't have a typical workday. Oftentimes I'll have days full of meetings where we're just talking about current litigation and briefs we're trying to put out or matters that have come up that we were thinking about whether we wanna get involved. In other days, it's just a lot of drafting or a lot of research and writing. We also have a really good externship program. So sometimes I'll work with externs on their memos or asking them to do different types of research. And Knight also has a research arm in addition to our litigation arm. So sometimes the litigation arm and the research arm will work together too to think about different issues that have come up and everyone's engaged in those discussions and how those issues might affect what direction we wanna take litigation or what kind of different areas we wanna be focused on, what arguments we're wanting to be making in those spaces. So a lot of variety. Amazing, thank you. So my next question is motivated a bit by something I've heard a lot when I'm talking to students, which is, I have a student or a 2L, they come back from their 2L summer and they'll say Kendra, I did X, I won't name what X is and Kendra, I hated it. Like it was not for me at all. I have wasted a summer. Like, I only have these two precious law school summers to ever get experiences. And anyway, yeah, I'm exaggerating slightly, but I think you get the point me. Which is to say, one thing that I'm really curious about, especially for folks as accomplished as all of y'all is what are, y'all have sound like you're doing incredible work that you're many times maybe really excited about. What were some things that you tried that you liked less? So my question is, has there been something in the course of your legal career that you learned was not for you? Or that you were like, I tried that and like that is not, I don't wanna do any more of that. Or I want this to be a pretty small part of what I'm doing going forward. And what was it? And maybe I'll take, I'll let y'all volunteer, whoever wants to go first can and then we can go from there. I'm happy to jump in because Kendra, I feel like the ability to practice and test when you're a law student is really critical. Practice not as the practice of law, but to get your feet wet. And I always encourage law students to try a number of different things. I think the more you can identify something you hate, that is wonderful actually because it rules out the things that you might consider doing. And so I think doing law clinics, externships, any number of outward facing things you can do as a law student, you should. I have always wanted and far before going to law school when I think back to these days and then once I began law school, I always wanted to work in some way around public service. Thinking about the very large and structural problems that society has. I imagine doing that in a very different way than what I do now. And part of what I really disliked was, I'm gonna be honest here, was family law. It was so incredibly heart-wrenching. I knew that for my own mental health, I could not do it. I tested while in law school a number of different kind of thematic practice areas and I found it too devastating. Ironically, someone could say, well, you work on police misconduct and you work on attacks on everyday people in other ways. My voting rights litigation. I don't know why it was, but I just couldn't do it. I also knew pretty immediately that I did not wanna do transactional law. And what's funny is maybe over the course of my lifetime, I will one day dabble in that. But I really think testing and finding things you dislike is wonderful. In fact, it's better than even the things you feel palatable about, where you're like, I could. I think it's wonderful to get to a point where you say, nope, crossing that off the list. And so I think law school should be a little more of a beta testing mentality for people where you get to dabble and see what you like. Thank you. Oh, sorry Kendra. Jumping off exactly what Nora said and what Kendra said. I think I was one of those 2Ls that you can talk or post 2L summers that you talked about. I split my 2L summer between NPR and another firm. And I spent some of the summer at the firm doing this kind of big commercial litigation. And while I respected the lawyers and I really actually really liked everyone there, I just could not get invested in those cases where it's just, for me, it was ultimately just a question of millions of dollars on both sides. And that's no shade to those cases. It's no shade to those attorneys, but it just wasn't for me. But I think Nora's point is exactly right because instead of just the gist of all, if I didn't like the experience, I really sat with it and interrogated, okay, what are the parts that I liked about it? What are the parts I did like about it? I valued the collegial relationships at that firm. And so that was something that was really important to me. But I realized that I can't just do work and just not have any meaning in it for me personally. And that was extraordinarily valuable, especially as Nora said, to do that, get that experience in law school and be able to kind of chart my course going forward after that. For me, I think both of my summer internships during law school, I actually quite enjoyed. I also worked for NPR, but I worked for their legal affairs correspondent and got to do some reporting on the Supreme Court. And then my second summer, I worked in the Washington Post Legal Department. But I think what both Nora and Meenu are saying is super important as far as figuring out what you don't like or aspects of what's not gonna work for you. So right out of law school, I clerked for a federal judge. It was a great experience in terms of I got to write a lot. I got to interact and be mentored by a judge, who was wonderful. But during that experience, I realized that I wanted work where I would really be interacting more with the people whom my work was affecting. So at this particular court, it was the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims. And I guess in my mind, I thought that I was going to be helping all these veterans and giving them hugs and cookies. And really, I never saw them because they rarely come to the court when it gets up to that level. And so it was a lot of just writing, which again, great experience. But I learned through that experience that I really wanted to have sort of, face-to-face or more meaningful engagements with the people that I was helping with my work. And so the SCLC obviously really lets me do that. So I think for me, that was important to have that experience, not only to get sort of the legal writing experience, but to know, okay, I'm looking for something a little more, something that feels more meaningful to me and my work. Yeah, and kind of to go off what everyone else has been saying here, I think finding out what you don't like to do is, or even just what you like to do less than other things is so helpful. I came into law school thinking that I was very interested in maybe taking a more academic route and becoming a law professor. And I quickly found out after like, research and writing my first year and not making it on law review to my 2L year, but like still having, trying to do more of the research academic aspects of law that compared to when I was doing litigation, like during my summer with the reporters committee and at the Cornell Clinic, I enjoyed litigation so much more. And it was so much easier for me to succeed in what I was doing in that realm too, because I was just more motivated. I really liked being involved in things as they were happening, which is not to say anything bad about the more academic route at all, because that's a great and valuable job as well. But yeah, and I think it was good for me to have those expectations undermined, especially when people tell you like, you need to be in law review to have any successful career after law school. And it felt like the end of the world at the time. And I quickly realized, once I started doing the things that I liked and was excelling at, that it definitely wasn't the end of the world. And I just found a better path for me. Thank you so much for sharing, Alyssa, and also everyone, as someone who also did not make it to law review and who's also heartbroken about it. I think at the time, I do think it's a really valuable moment to be like, hey, can I achieve this thing that I was interested in in some other way? And it turns out in being a lawyer, sometimes a lot of the stuff that I think is appealing about being a legal academic is actually things you can do, not being a legal academic, right? If you're doing litigation, you're gonna be doing research. You don't have the option of not doing it. So I think that's such a good point that sometimes I had a law professor in law school who would always be like, well, like sometimes doors close and that's fine. And like sometimes windows open and then sometimes windows don't open. And we were all like, okay, like this is the most weirdly constructed house that I am currently imagining. But I think that your point, which is that, hey, you may learn this thing I thought I wanted is not actually quite what I was looking for and that's super valuable. So thank you everybody for sharing. My next question is maybe I think a little bit unusual and I've cleared it with panelists in advance. So if you're watching and you're like, oh my God, I can't believe Kendra asked this and was putting them on the spot. I'm always curious especially for folks who might be underrepresented or from groups that have been traditionally historically excluded from First Amendment law, how that student debt and both from maybe law school or from undergrad or other kinds of financial obligations including like familial support or taking care of kids, being a caregiver, how that affects career decisions. And so I've asked our panelists if they feel comfortable to talk about how they thought about student debt when they were sort of figuring out their careers or about sort of financial decision making more generally and how it impacted their choices. Cause I think that's something we don't often sort of verbalize directly in these conversations about careers enough and so I want to sort of put it on the table. So again, I'll happy to have y'all go in whatever order you're most comfortable with. I'm happy to start. And just because I hate awkward silence is that's really the primary reason. Not that this was an awkward silence, but yes, I'm so glad that this is a question. I'm so that we're talking about it because I think, I mean, I think this is in law generally but I feel especially like in the First Amendment and the public interest space, nobody talks about it. So to answer your question, 150% yes as to student loan making an impact on my career choices. Actually, so in the spring of my fellowship at night I was trying to figure what I was gonna do next. And I really, I mean, I had done a lot of clinical work in law school. I had done this public interest fellowship that I loved and I was really interested in continuing that. But I think there reached a moment where especially early on in public interest work it seems like the typical trajectory is fellowship popping and really just hoping and praying that somewhere a staff attorney position will open up or something that's a little more permanent. And a lot of that is luck. A lot of that is just being right time, right place. And being willing to accept, I think a lot of like fluctuation in your personal life in terms of moving every year, it's very chaotic. And so I had this moment where I was deciding between applying for some more First Amendment fellowships or going back to the firm I suffered at. This is all before the current opportunity at DWT opened up. But I just had this moment with myself where I just was like, I cannot keep doing the fellowship circuit. I had done two one-year gigs in a row and just from a personal and a financial level I just didn't think that was gonna be sustainable for me. So, and I really wanna emphasize that this position at DWT that I'm working at now, I mean, it was purely luck in terms of that is when that posting went up, that's when I applied. And I do think that's something that's also not emphasized enough is, yes, we put in the work and we get these opportunities and we work for them, but we also get the nudge from our clinical professor or clinical supervisor or just purely by chance, the position opens up and that's how you get your foot in the door. So I think that's another dimension of that that I think people like to look back and see things as this linear input output narrative, which is not always the case. But yeah, I mean, I think to more substantively answer the question, I think being at a firm and being honestly having the luck of having the best of both worlds where I get to do all media first amendment work and get the firm salary is frankly a ridiculously lucky position to be in. But it shaped, and I think it was important for me to reach that kind of moment of reckoning even before this position opened up that I just from a financial level was not with the amount of debt I'd have was just not gonna be sustainable and being a single person and all of that it wasn't sustainable and with some family considerations. So I'm glad we're talking about it because I think it's huge. And I think especially in the public interest space especially for early career attorneys really shapes the positions that you're able to take on responsibly for your own finances. Thank you so much for sharing that. Yeah, and I could not agree more. So I'm grateful to hear you talk about your experience with it. I can jump in too. Cause yeah, this was a huge consideration for me especially when I was applying to law school cause I knew I wanted to be, I wanted to go into public interest and I wanted to make sure that that was something feasible because I wasn't, if you have too many students it just becomes not a feasible career path. And so I was very conscious of like what scholarships were available and what my schools, like what school, what assistance my school would be able to provide afterwards in terms of public interest funding which, and that takes like a lot of footwork and it still takes a lot of footwork being aware of like what your options are and like if you're going to, if you're going to try to get low in forgiveness and like coordinating all that. One thing that, and obviously like those are huge concerns for some people. One thing that I think is good about being aware of those options which obviously takes a lot of time and energy but especially if you want to go into something like first amendment law or an area of law that's harder to get into, doing fellowships the first couple of years even if you plan to go into big law later I think I found that to be a good option and I'm not sure what I'm going to do later but I think it's a good option because fellowships are a good doorway into this area of law that you might not get later because they're often only open to recently graduated attorneys. And so, yeah, I think it's a good thing to take advantage of early on and just to like even if you change past later. Yeah, thank you for that, Alyssa because I do think part of it is it's not just affecting your post-law school graduation choices, right? It's also about where you go to law school, what you do while you're there, what kinds of decisions you're making and I think that's such a value like important to emphasize and I think you're also 100% right but one of the hard parts about the financial dealing with the financial realities of post-law school is knowing that fellowships are an amazing opportunity to get your foot in the door to meet folks and that for some folks, they may or may not be an option because of personal circumstances because of financial circumstances. I was really struck by what you were saying about like when you're doing two one-year fellowships or a couple one-year fellowships you're applying for jobs every year, right? And that's independent of the moving and the payment, right? That's just an incredibly stressful process. So thank you, Alyssa. Summer or Nora, do you wanna share? Sure, I guess I'll just say perhaps I was the irresponsible one of the bunch of us I think that I knew, I pretty much knew going into law school that I wouldn't wanna have sort of your typical like lawyer at a big law firm type job unless it were at a place where I got to do like first amendment law like Minoo was saying. So I kind of accepted I was gonna be in debt and luckily did not have, I mean, some people have at the time kids they have to worry about or other family members. So I was privileged enough not to have those additional burdens. But I did, I will say when I was trying to choose between law schools, I spent like this in an organ amount of time panicking over whether I should choose to go to Georgetown which was giving me a partial scholarship and Vanderbilt which offered me basically a full ride. And I knew that, I guess I'm not really sure I'd explain it. I knew that sort of the type of law that I wanted to practice that DC would be a great place to be even though Vanderbilt was a great school as well and have first amendment clinic and wonderful school. But I guess all that to say, I ended up sort of kind of on a wing and a prayer hoping that the public, the 10 year public service loan forgiveness program would pan out and that I just knew myself and knew that I couldn't be in a job that I was miserable at even if I was making a lot of money. So I decided to just sort of go for it and still jogging along. But yeah, definitely was and still is a consideration but I just kind of accepted it. I don't think that's irresponsible just to be clear. I think that's very normal. And I think that in some ways, I think we can also do, sometimes we can do a disservice to our students, to our, considering the stuff to be like, you have to make all your career choices based on these financial stuff, where we're telling other students, oh no, just follow your heart. And so I think that it's always a balance in terms of making sure that folks are able to pursue their career path they want, while sort of making sure that they, to whatever extent they feel it's useful to think about the financial stuff that they have thought about that. So Summer, thank you for sharing. Nora, do you have stuff you wanted to share? Yeah, I think this is an excellent question and one that I wish we'd discussed more, not just in the First Amendment space or public service space, but generally the kinds of structural inequities that the legal system perpetuates. I feel lucky, as I've said before, that I had enough money to afford the applications for law schools and for more than just one or two law schools. But there are law students that I've worked with and that I know, I'm sorry, there are students who want to apply to law school, who can't afford more than one application. So from go, there are financial barriers. There are also barriers and sort of inequities around testing and how well people test depending on their education, where they come from, a number of factors. And all of this, I think, is the first very huge hurdle in even getting applications into law schools that could increase your chances of going to law school. I got a very wonderful and significant scholarship to go to Emory Law, which is why I chose Emory Law. It's the only school that gave me a scholarship of any sort and it was sizable. And it was also serendipitous because I ended up connecting with wonderful civil rights lawyers and leaders, John Lewis, Stacey Abrams, people that ended up becoming very meaningful for me in my career and my life. And I think the scholarship helped push me, of course, to accept that invitation from Emory Law. But it should not, as I think has been alluded here, preclude students if they can afford otherwise. It's more that I believe it's important that we talk about who is by the system as it was designed, left out, and who have a much harder time accessing the legal education system. And then, of course, what follows from that is that legal education also has structural inequities in other ways, case law being written by white men. There are so many reasons that the histories of law and of the legal system are problematic. So I actually think this question is part of a much bigger conversation we should be having about why we need more women. We need more women of color. We need more people of color. We need more groups that would be otherwise considered marginalized. And as I look at this panel, I'm so pleased. Part of what I was thrilled about was that this is like all women, women of color. That is not a prerequisite always, but it is something that many overlook. And this is in the fight ahead, I think we actually need to find ways to not overlook those systemic failures. So I was so excited when I got this question in advance. And I think we need to de-stigmatize that it's something we don't talk about because we should. And there are people that I can't keep giving money to apply to law school, or you can't. And we need to find ways as a pipeline to build the bench. 100%, I feel like it sounds like you were just like, oh, I asked you to set up it for a mission and I didn't, I swear. But thank you, yeah, thank you so much for that, everybody for sharing that stuff. So we actually have a couple of questions in the chat and the Q and A that I wanna just throw in and then we're gonna, I'll close with our final question, which is sort of offering a piece of advice. So one question that someone asked is, hey, it seems like there's a lot of first amendment jobs in the DC area, but I'm interested in working in the Midwest, I haven't seen many opportunities there. What's the best first step for finding those opportunities or do they simply not exist? I'm gonna spoiler and say, I don't think our panel will say that they simply don't exist. But I think this is, if Ryan will permit me to also generalize more broadly a little bit from their question, it can be easy to look at first amendment law and see kind of big organizations. How else would folks find opportunities maybe more local to them? How would you suggest folks do that? Well, I have some very good friends at the ACLU of Minnesota and they are doing fantastic first amendment work. I can't promise anything, but I'm always happy to make referrals for people. They took on and have been leading some wonderful litigation around the targeting of press and protesters during and what followed George Floyd's murder. And that is some fantastic local litigation. There are also now, I think opportunities in first amendment and across the board because of COVID that are remote. And so I would doggedly pursue opportunities around the country and make the case that you are uniquely positioned for some kind of job, more flexibility now than ever before, which benefits public service. Now, this is something I really care about. I'm from Tennessee and I went to college in North Carolina and especially if you're interested in the first amendment space. Those rights are being besieged in all sorts of ways in all of these states outside of, I mean, inside metropolitan capitals too, but really outside of them as well. The one thing I would say is I'm so excited to see this amazing network of clinic. This is not an IFRA plug, but an amazing network of clinic. I mean, it is, but amazing network of clinics that has, first amendment clinics that has come up all across the country. I mean, there's one in Colorado, there's one in Tennessee, there's one in North Carolina, and they're all over the country and they're doing incredible frontline first amendment free speech work. So to the extent that, I don't know if this, I guess this person is in law school already, but to the extent that you can work with those clinics or, you know, summer at them, most clinics have summer opportunities at their, so maybe you can work on their cases, you know, locally based. So I think that's an amazing opportunity because those clinics are, I think, are at the front lines of many of these free speech and free expression battles. So that's a good way to get outside the New York DC San Francisco, you know, concentrations. I'm gonna jump in with one suggestion of my own for Ryan, which is something I wish someone had told me when I was in law school. One suggestion I would have, especially if they're specific cities where you know that you're interested in is literally just to like look at state court dockets of like, you know, seeing if there's like a topical search or a specific search for the kinds of like law that you might be interested in, whether it's, you know, you could look at like freedom of information, whatever the local freedom of information request law is and see if you can find court dockets and look at who's on them, right? Because, you know, the reality is that, you know, a search for first amendment name of city might not turn up a ton of local lawyers who are doing that work, it might maybe, but oftentimes even independent of these bigger organizations, right? There are local lawyers who are doing the work who would love to probably talk to you about their practice and maybe put you in touch with other folks that they know, independent of whether they're ever gonna be in a position to hire someone or not. So I think that can be valuable. I'm gonna jump to, I think there's a question about NPR and folks asked if there's a couple of different folks different folks who've had experiences at NPR. So maybe we'll take that real fast and then people are asking all kinds of really fantastic questions. So we'll do that, maybe do that one real fast and then I'll jump to, there's one about sort of thinking about the first amendment as a field and then we'll close out with offering advice. So, sorry, let me repeat the question for those who are not reading the Q and A. As someone who is considered a position at NPR, can those of you with experience there talk about how that went for you and what that was like? I guess that's summer and summer, I've been talking a lot, so have you to go if you wanna go first? Okay, well, my experience at NPR was a little less traditional legal work because I worked for the Legal Affairs Correspondent and so it was still legal work in the sense that I had to do research on the Supreme Court cases and figure out who to interview and it was really great in the sense that, so when I worked there, I guess I worked from like a May to an August. So it was the end of the term, all the big cases were coming down and so it was really on the job learning like I worked for Nina Totenberg and so she would tell me like, hey, you read the dissent, I'm reading the majority opinion, you tell me what I need to know because I need to be on air in 10 minutes and I was like, I got, okay. So it was fascinating and it was, I got to write like the online versions of her radio stories, so it was great experience. Again, not your traditional, I didn't work in the legal department, which maybe you did, Nina, but so again, not the traditional experience but it was wonderful. It was after my first semester of law school, so it was like writing about all these cases that I had been learning about during the semester and so it was amazing, easily one of my favorite jobs to date and I do think that even though it was more journalism focused, it definitely helped my legal skills as well because I was having to learn how to analyze the cases, I was talking to legal experts all the time to interview them, so it was great. Yeah, and I'll be quick because I know we've got other questions and I'm happy to talk longer with this person offline if they're interested. But yeah, so I was in the legal department, the GC's office at NPR and it was my first real in-house experience, which was amazing and most of what it was was working with the in-house council. I mean, I got kind of my first preview of dating experience there. The thing that I found really valuable in addition to meeting the wonderful people at NPR is that I really missed the litigation because many as probably know, many in-house legal departments at news organizations these days, the New York Times is a big exception, don't do that much litigation anymore, primarily for cost reasons, so most of the time to hire outside counsel. So I really missed that part, but it was great exposure to what being an in-house counsel would be like and like I said, I'm happy to talk more about that if you're interested. Thank you. I am sad because there are so many great questions, but I wanna give us all a sort of a chance to kind of close and reflect. So I'm gonna not take any of the great, amazing questions and close with one of my own, which is to say, I know if for a primarily focuses on providing support to students of color, and I'm specifically curious and knowing that advice from any of us who have sort of made it through the pipeline is not necessarily always the most useful because sometimes there's a survivorship bias, right? But whether any of you have advice that you would share with students of color who are interested in or maybe curious about even pursuing a First Amendment career? And yeah, I'd love to just close with that question and then I'll do a little bit of a wrap up. I'm happy to go first. Yeah, just, I mean, like you said, maybe there's some bias involved, but I would strongly encourage, especially students of color to get involved in the First Amendment space if they're interested or just in exploring it further. I think so much of First Amendment law has been shaped by a very homogenous group of people and it would, I think it serves the goals of the First Amendment, which is cultivating free speech for everyone on an equal basis. Good, it would serve it well to have a more diverse group of people involved because it's not just what is equal on paper, it's what's equal in execution. And people with different experiences can speak differently to that. And we can have a more holistic view of the First Amendment and one focused on actually raising up people's voices that are more traditionally marginalized that might not actually have equal and free speech as the law currently is. So yeah, and places like IFRA and other places focus on First Amendment and getting a more diverse practice in the First Amendment, I think are good starting places, good places to reach out to because you'll find like-minded people and people encouraging you and willing to provide a helping hand. And it's nice to see a more diverse group of people to practicing First Amendment law. Yeah, I would agree with that. I think the most important thing you can do is just like sort of dive in, get experience, find a mentor, find places like IFRA and other organizations that are particularly working on adding more voices of diversity to this dialogue. I saw, you know, quickly in the chat a question about someone being sort of conflicted or hesitant to do this sort of work because some of it may seem very sort of like white and free speech has been sort of co-opted in a way to even further harm marginalized communities. And I will just say that I sort of felt that myself, you know, I sort of at the beginning of my career and thought, oh, should I be off like doing civil rights work instead or like what's something that's actually going to help sort of people that look like me. But, you know, as Alyssa said, this space needs those diverse voices. It needs those people from communities that haven't always been represented well. And so I guess my advice is don't let the perception that it's being co-opted by, you know, racist or any of these other sort of whitewash things keep you from engaging in what can be really meaningful work. And so, yeah. Yeah, I totally agree with that. I think the one additional thing I would say is I think the same norms that tend to bleed into journalism also bleed into the law in the sense that we're told to not bring our biases to not bring our subjectivity. And that's I think especially true when you're defending journalists or something that I think that's not the case. I mean, I think one's background is so crucial, especially in the First Amendment and the other areas of the law. But, you know, just to give you an example of vetting. I mean, when you review a news story, you're bringing your own experience to bear to identify what are the issues being talked about or what are the things that are legally risky. And so that's one piece of it. And I totally agree with Alyssa and Summer that, you know, I think you don't have to practice. And this is something that I've only kind of in the last couple of years really come around to is that you don't have to practice First Amendment law exclusively to have a First Amendment career. I think the traditional model of the job is people who come from a background of protecting journalists and who are doing media law. But, I mean, these days free expression has had so many dimensions outside the First Amendment space, everything from reproductive justice and compelled speech cases to criminal procedure and, you know, more of the privacy surveillance angle. You can be an amazing criminal defense lawyer and be a First Amendment lawyer. And I think that's something that we don't talk about enough. And I think the really quickly last thing I'll say is I do unfortunately think, and I hope this changes very much, you know, within our lifetimes, but you often are going to be the only POC in the room. I mean, my fellowship at night was frankly the first and I think only place to date where I wasn't. And that was, there was really a liberation there. And it felt very viscerally different. And it's not the case in my current job, you know, and it's something I struggle with and it's fraught and it's exhausting. But I think the key there is to not, you know, is to have your networks and have your communities in place to support you. And I, you know, spent a lot of time wishing and hoping it would be different. And I hope it is and working every day to make sure it is, it's not, or it is, but you have to also be realistic. And I think making sure that you don't, you know, get totally beaten down by the system every day is something to be really pragmatically aware of. Thank you. Nora, I wanna close this out, yeah. Sure. I think if we take a step back from this panel and from frankly just being in this right now, in the moment, there are a number of compounding crises facing society from the physical attacks and rise of hate crimes against people of color all over the world, the ways that dissent in authoritarian countries and even here in the United States when it is perpetuated and brought forth by communities of color, BIPOC communities, those are silenced and shut down. And I believe that the digital age has made the problems more severe. And so we're all living in very different realities many times unaware of what people are consuming or how extremism is being used to sow division among us. And that is my ongoing talking point, honestly Kendra. And I think that at the heart of it means we need to be fighting for what is the chipping away of basic rights and free expression is central to those. As a woman of color and as a civil rights lawyer, I cannot say enough that we need more of people like me and people like people on this panel. And the sense that rightly the term free speech has felt co-opted is something to acknowledge. I also wholeheartedly reject it because I think it is an absurd premise. And in rejecting it, I think part of what we need to do is assert the ways that we can provide very clear evidence and documentation around the ways that dissent communities of color, marginalized groups, other racial and identity based attacks are really pointed towards progress. And in that, we are looking at the next 10 years that I think are going to be far worse even than the civil rights era here in this country because they will be compounded by the things that are now more voluminous and chaotic. And in that, it is in no uncertain terms that I make an urgent plea that people thinking about this career enter it because we literally need more. I am exhausted all the time and I love my job as I said, but I am exhausted. And we need more women, we need more people of color, we need it all, we need it yesterday. So the question is so valid. And it's one that I in no way try to shut down or say as a non-starter, I'm really calling you in. I am saying we need more of you. So it is out of inspiration and excitement and wanting to build, as I call it, the bench of qualified lawyers that I say that because the fight is very, very long. Thank you, Nora. What an incredible note to end on. Thank you to all of our fantastic panelists honored to be here with all of y'all and your wisdom and your experiences. And thank you so thank you just so much for taking the time and energy and sharing with us. Just some closing notes. I wanna thank Josh.Cour and Rubin Lingman for their logistical support and to our interpreters, Carol and Shannon for interpreting. You can sign up for our obligatory plugs. You can sign up for our newsletter at ifra.org. We promise to only email you fun things occasionally and a reminder that our applications are open for our next year's cohort. We would love to have applications from folks here. And I think a number of folks on this panel have said they'd be happy to chat with people more. So if panelists wanna throw contact information that they're comfortable with people using in chat, that's great. Thank you so much everybody for joining us. I really appreciate it.