Professor RonNell Andersen Jones is Teitelbaum Chair and University Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Utah S.J. Quinney’s College of Law. She is an Affiliated Fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project and a Senior Visiting Research Scholar at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.

A former newspaper reporter and editor, Professor Andersen Jones is a First Amendment scholar who teaches, researches, and writes on legal issues affecting the press and on the intersection between media and the courts. Her scholarship addresses issues of press freedom and its role in a healthy democracy. She is also a widely cited national expert on defamation, reporter’s privilege, newsgathering rights, and speech on social media. She is an elected member of the American Law Institute. Her scholarly work has appeared in numerous books and journals, including Northwestern Law Review, Michigan Law Review, UCLA Law Review, Minnesota Law Review, and the Harvard Law Review Forum. She is also a regular public commentator on press freedom issues. Her op-eds have been published in several major news outlets, including CNN and The New York Times, and her research has been quoted in The New Yorker, the Washington Post, The Guardian, The New York Times, and other national and international publications.

Professor Andersen Jones graduated first in her law school class and clerked for the Honorable William A. Fletcher on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor on the United States Supreme Court. Prior to entering academia, she was an attorney in the Issues & Appeals section of Jones Day, where her work focused on Supreme Court litigation.