Speaking Freely

Nadine Strossen, the John Marshall Harlan II Professor of Law Emerita at New York Law School and past President of the American Civil Liberties Union (1991-2008), is a Senior Fellow with FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Education) and a leading expert and frequent speaker/media commentator on constitutional law and civil liberties, who has testified before Congress on multiple occasions. She serves on the advisory boards of the ACLU, Academic Freedom Alliance, Heterodox Academy, National Coalition Against Censorship, and the University of Austin.

The National Law Journal has named Strossen one of America’s “100 Most Influential Lawyers,” and several other publications have named her one of the country’s most influential women.  Her many honorary degrees and awards include the American Bar Association’s prestigious Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement Award (2017). In 2023, the National Coalition Against Censorship (an alliance of more than 50 national non-profit organizations) selected Strossen for its Judy Blume Lifetime Achievement Award for Free Speech.

When Strossen stepped down as ACLU President, three (ideologically diverse) Supreme Court Justices participated in her farewell/tribute luncheon: Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Antonin Scalia, and David Souter.

She is the author of HATE: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship (2018) and Free Speech: What Everyone Needs to Know® (2023).  She is also the Host and Project Consultant for Free To Speak, a 3-hour documentary film series on free speech that was released on public television in 2023 (and is also available on YouTube).

Her book Defending Pornography:  Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women’s Rights was named a New York Times “notable book” of 1995, and was  republished in 2024 as part of the New York University Press “Classic” series.  Her book HATE was selected as the “Common Read” by Washington University and Washburn University.

Strossen graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard College and magna cum laude from Harvard Law School. Before becoming a law professor, she practiced law in Minneapolis (her hometown) and New York City. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Stephen Buckley has been The Dallas Morning News’ public editor since April 2024. A veteran editor and educator who worked at The Washington Post, Tampa Bay Times and the Poynter Institute, Stephen is a faculty member at Duke University’s Dewitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy, where he has taught journalism and public policy since 2021.

After graduating from Duke in 1989, Stephen spent 12 years at The Post as a local reporter and foreign correspondent. He covered education, courts and the night police beat before joining the international reporting staff, initially as the Post’s Africa Bureau Chief (based in Nairobi) and then as the paper’s first correspondent based in Brazil. He returned to St. Petersburg in 2001 as a national reporter for the Times before taking on several leadership roles, ultimately becoming managing editor and then publisher of tampabay.com, the paper’s website. He moved to the Poynter Institute in 2010 as dean of the faculty.

In 2014, he moved back to Nairobi, where he taught at The Aga Khan University’s Graduate School of Media and Communications before becoming the lead story editor for Global Press Journal, an international news organization that focuses its reporting on under covered regions.

Ashley Muddiman (Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin) is an associate professor and associate chair in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Kansas, and a faculty research associate with the Center for Democratic Governance (University of Kansas) and the Center for Media Engagement (University of Texas). Her work focuses broadly on democracy and political communication, specifically investigating political incivility and democratic norms, political media content and its effects on the public, and mis- and disinformation in democratic contexts.

She has earned fellowships with the Social Science Research Council, studying whether political incivility on women candidates’ social media spaces may serve as a barrier to entry into politics, and The New Institute (Germany), investigating how solutions-focused news coverage can decrease polarization in online discussion. Her current projects include a national survey collecting public perceptions of political incivility; an investigation of political hostility in local KS, MO, and OK news coverage during the 2024 election season; and an exploration of how strategic uncertainty used by political leaders may undermine trust in accurate information and public institutions.