Clay Calvert: Free Speech and Public School Students–Lessons From a Cursing Cheerleader and South Park

Date/Time
Date(s) - 09/21/2022
6:30 pm - 7:45 pm

The 2022 First Amendment Day Keynote speaker will be Clay Calvert, Professor of Law, Brechner Eminent Scholar in Mass Communication and Director of the Marion B. Brechner First Amendment Project at the University of Florida.  Prof. Calvert holds a joint appointment with the College of Journalism and Communications and the Levin College of Law.  Calvert has published more than 150 law journal articles related to issues affecting freedom of expression.  He has taught courses on communications and media law for more than twenty-five years, including courses at the undergraduate, graduate and law school levels.

Calvert is co-author of a market-leading undergraduate textbook Mass Media Law, 22nd Edition (McGraw-Hill Education 2023) and is the author of Voyeur Nation: Media, Privacy, and Peering in Modern Culture (Westview Press 2000).  He is a member of the State Bar of California and the Bar of the Supreme Court of the United States.  Calvert earned a Ph.D. in Communication from Stanford University, where he also completed his undergraduate work with a B.A. with Distinction in Communication.  He received his J.D. (Order of the Coif) from the University of the Pacific’s McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento.

Using the United States Supreme Court’s 2021 ruling in the student-speech case of Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L. as a springboard and the kids from South Park as a supporting cast, this wide-ranging talk will address some fundamentals about the First Amendment guarantee of free expression, as well as details about the speech rights of public school students in the social media era.

Video from the event is below.