Clay Calvert (1964- ) is one of the most prolific First Amendment scholars in the country. He retired from the University of Florida’s College of Journalism and Communication in 2022 where he was director of the Marion B. Brechner First Amendment Project. He is now professor emeritus and has worked since June 2023 as a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute where he writes regularly about matters at the intersection of technology, media law and the First Amendment.
Born in California, Calvert grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. He earned his undergraduate degree from Stanford University in 1987, his law degree from University of the Pacific McGeorge School of Law, and a Ph.D. from Stanford. For more than a decade, he worked at the Pennsylvania Center for the First Amendment, where he worked closely with fellow First Amendment scholar Robert Richards.
Calvert has authored or co-authored more than 150 law review articles. Most deal with different First Amendment topics, including articles on broadcast indecency, recording of police activities, newsgathering, the relationship between the First Amendment and copyright law, true threat doctrine, and revenge pornography. He is the co-author of a leading undergraduate textbook Mass Media Law, 2026 Release, and Voyeur Nation: Media, Privacy, and Peering in Modern Culture (2000).
David L. Hudson, Jr. is a law professor at Belmont who publishes widely on First Amendment topics. He is the author of a 12-lecture audio course on the First Amendment entitled Freedom of Speech: Understanding the First Amendment (Now You Know Media, 2018). He also is the author of many First Amendment books, including The First Amendment: Freedom of Speech (Thomson Reuters, 2012) and Freedom of Speech: Documents Decoded (ABC-CLIO, 2017). This article was originally published in 2017.