The James R. Cleary Prize for Student Media Law and Policy Research in 2025

By on February 18, 2026 in Center for Media Law and Policy

The UNC Center for Media Law and Policy is now accepting submissions for the James R. Cleary Prize for student media law and policy research published in 2025. The annual award competition, which highlights the best student-authored scholarly articles on media law and policy-related topics, honors the legacy of James R. Cleary, an attorney who practiced for 56 years in Huntsville, Ala.  He was particularly interested in the communications field and media law issues.  Cleary’s daughter, Johanna Cleary, is a 2004 Ph.D. graduate of the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media.

The prize competition is open to all college and university students. Up to three winners will be selected, with a first prize of $1,000, a second prize of $500, and a third prize of $250. The prizes will be awarded to the authors of published papers that most creatively and convincingly propose solutions to significant problems in the field of media law and policy.  We define this subject matter broadly, including copyright, trademark, social media regulation, and First Amendment speech and press issues. All methodologies are welcome.

The deadline for submission is April 30, 2026.

Rules

  1. The author of the submitted publication must have been enrolled in a graduate or undergraduate degree-granting program in the United States at the time the article was accepted for publication. This includes, but is not limited to, students enrolled in M.A. and Ph.D. programs, law school (including J.D., LL.M., and J.S.D. candidates), and other professional schools (including M.B.A. candidates).
  2. The submitted paper must have been published in a law review or peer-reviewed journal during the 2025 calendar year.
  3. Each student may submit only one entry.
  4. Jointly authored papers are eligible, provided all authors meet the eligibility requirements for the competition. If a winning paper has more than one author, the prize will be split equally among the co-authors. No work with a faculty co-author will be considered.
  5. Each entry must be the original work of the listed author(s). The author(s) must perform all of the key tasks of identifying the topic, researching it, analyzing it, formulating positions and arguments, and writing and revising the paper.
  6. Papers will be evaluated based on a number of factors, including thoroughness of research and analysis, relevance to the competition topic, relevance to current legal and/ or public policy debates, originality of thought, and clarity of expression.
  7. The prize will be monetary. Winners will be required to submit a completed W-9, affidavit of eligibility, tax acknowledgment, and liability release for tax purposes as a condition of receiving the cash prize.
  8. In the unlikely event that entries are of insufficient quality to merit an award, the Center for Media Law and Policy reserves the right not to award some or all of the prizes.

Submission Process

  • All entries must be received by 11:59 p.m. EST on April 30, 2026.
  • Entries must be sent via email to medialaw[at]unc.edu with the following in the subject line: “James R. Cleary Prize Submission: [Name of Author]”
  • Papers should be submitted in Portable Document Format (.pdf).
  • Entries MUST include a signed cover sheet that may be downloaded from the Center for Media Law Policy’s website here.

A review committee comprised of faculty and affiliates from the UNC Center for Media Law and Policy will review the submissions and determine the winning paper(s). The decisions of the committee are final. Winners will be notified and final results will appear on the Center’s website in late spring. Due to the large number of expected entries, the Center cannot contact all non-winning entrants.

For more information, please visit our Cleary Competition page.

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Article: The Mathematics of Regulatory Fragmentation

By on February 18, 2026 in Center for Media Law and Policy, Internet

This study explores the rapidly evolving landscape of state-level digital platform regulation in the United States and uncovers a surprising mathematical dimension to how overlapping laws impact technology design, compliance costs, and market dynamics.

MATHEMATICS OF REGULATORY FRAGMENTATION

🔍 What the Research Explores

State governments have introduced a patchwork of social media safety laws that impose technical mandates on online platforms — especially aimed at enhancing user protections such as youth safety. While well-intentioned, these regulations do not simply add compliance costs as jurisdictions pile on more rules. Instead:

  • Each new state requirement interacts with every other, creating multiplicative — not additive — technical burdens for platforms.

  • This exponential growth in complexity stems from a combinatorial reality: as more distinct regulations are introduced, the number of potential conflicts and design constraints multiplies rapidly.

  • Smaller platforms and new market entrants are particularly disadvantaged, as they face disproportionately high engineering and operational costs to satisfy conflicting rules across jurisdictions.

  • Ironically, regulatory fragmentation may also undermine the very safeguards these laws are meant to provide, by incentivizing workarounds and fragmenting the user experience.

📌 Why It Matters

This research highlights a critical, often overlooked dimension of digital policy: the interactions between laws matter just as much as the content of the laws themselves. By applying mathematical reasoning to regulation, this work provides policymakers, researchers, and technologists with a new lens for assessing the real-world effects of decentralized digital governance.

The paper contributes to debates on platform regulation, digital governance, and the economics of compliance: topics that are central to recent legislative efforts across the U.S. and around the world.

📥 Read the Paper

The full paper (58 pages) is available on SSRN.

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Sealed Justice: Federal Courts’ Inconsistent Record-Sealing Rules and Their Impact on Judicial Transparency

By on January 12, 2026 in First Amendment, Transparency

My article titled “Sealed Justice: Federal Courts’ Inconsistent Record-Sealing Rules and Their Impact on Judicial Transparency” recently came out in the Journal of Free Speech Law. In the article I argue that federal district courts are doing a poor job of  protecting the public’s right of access to court records. Despite the longstanding presumption that court records are open for public inspection, parties frequently attempt to “seal” documents in order to hide them from public view. Empirical research reveals that the sealing of court records is extensive and increasing. This project is the first to comprehensively examine whether federal district courts provide clear and consistent local rules for sealing court records in civil and criminal cases. It also evaluates whether these local rules align with established Supreme Court and circuit court precedent concerning the public’s right of access to judicial records.

Here is the full abstract:

Public access to court records is a cornerstone of democratic governance, enabling public oversight of the judiciary and fostering confidence in the rule of law. Despite a strong presumption in favor of openness under both the First Amendment and common law, the sealing of federal court records has become widespread, often with minimal judicial scrutiny. Recent investigations have revealed that excessive court secrecy shields government and corporate misconduct, conceals vital public-safety information, and erodes public confidence in the courts.

This Article presents the first comprehensive analysis of the local rules governing sealing in all 94 federal districts, reviewing more than 700 provisions in both civil and criminal rules. The findings are concerning: Nearly half of all districts lack general sealing rules, many fail to reference the controlling legal standard, and basic procedural safeguards—such as public notice, consideration of alternatives to sealing, and case-specific identification of harms—are frequently absent. These deficiencies have created a patchwork of inconsistent, often toothless rules that enable secrecy to spread largely unchecked.

Without changes to federal rules, court-ordered secrecy will continue to erode public trust and obscure the work of the federal courts. This Article proposes three core principles to guide this reform. First, substantive clarity: Every rule governing sealing should expressly affirm the presumption of public access and incorporate, at a minimum, the common law’s requirements for sealing. Second, procedural rigor: Rules should require public notice of sealing requests, an opportunity for objections, identification of specific harms, consideration of less-restrictive alternatives, and mechanisms for periodic review and unsealing. Third, administrative efficiency: Rules should require parties to limit the frequency and narrow the scope of their sealing re-quests, explore redaction as an alternative, and certify their efforts to minimize the need for sealing.

You can download the article from SSRN or from the Journal of Free Speech Law.

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Second Annual Aspiring Free Speech Scholars Workshop

By on November 26, 2025 in First Amendment

Second Annual Aspiring Free Speech Scholars Workshop
jointly sponsored by the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law (ASU)
and the Hoover Institution (Stanford University)

Posted on behalf of Eugene Volokh and James Weinstein:

Are you a law student, judicial law clerk, lawyer, or beginning academic hoping to publish a journal article on free speech law? Would you like the opportunity to get advice about your draft from leading free speech scholars?

If so, send us your draft by Sunday, August 16, 2026. (This should still be a draft article, not an article that’s already published or expected to be published within six months.) We plan to select the submissions that we think are particularly promising, and invite their authors to a workshop where they can present their papers and get helpful feedback on them. The workshop will be Saturday, October 24, 2026 (with dinner the night before) at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law in Phoenix, and we will inform the selected authors by Tuesday, September 8, 2026.

We have funds to pay for transportation and lodging for the selected authors’ trips. Eligibility is limited to people who have so far published three or fewer law-related journal articles.

We also plan to officially recognize zero to three of the top articles among those we review. If the authors wish, they can also have their articles reviewed for publication in the Journal of Free Speech Law (http://JournalOfFreeSpeechLaw.org), presumably after they revise the articles in light of the workshop feedback.

If you’re interested, please submit your draft at http://tinyurl.com/aspiring-free-speech (Google logon required). Please single-space, and format the article nicely, so we can more easily read it.

Please do not include your name or law school affiliation in the document or document filename, and please do not include an author’s note thanking your advisors and others. Please make your filename be the title of your article (or some recognizable subset of the article title). We want to review the article drafts without knowing the authors’ identities.

If you have questions, please check http://tinyurl.com/aspiring-free-speech-faq; if your question isn’t answered there, please e-mail volokh@stanford.edu.

Many thanks to the Stanton Foundation for its generous support.

* * *

James Weinstein, Dan Cracchiolo Chair in Constitutional Law and Professor of Law, Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, Arizona State University

Eugene Volokh, Thomas M. Siebel Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution (Stanford University), and Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus, UCLA School of Law

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[Article] Nerd Harder: A Typology of Techno-Legal Solutionist Logics in Child Online Safety Laws

By on November 18, 2025 in Center for Media Law and Policy, Internet, Privacy

Co-authored with Lorcan Neill and Evan Ringel, our project examines recently enacted state-level child online safety laws (COSLs) and demonstrates how different techno-legal solutionist logics manifest in these legislative efforts.

Our analysis demonstrates three interdependent patterns: (1) the checklist fallacy (reducing safety to discrete technical features), (2) the false promise of age verification (assuming identity verification will prevent harm), and (3) the design determinism myth (overestimating design’s power to shape social outcomes).

The appeal of techno-legal solutionism transcends borders–from California to Brussels, it offers policymakers seemingly clear solutions to complex problems. However, our analysis shows that this approach fundamentally misunderstands both the social shaping of technology and the complexity of youth well-being. Technologies can influence outcomes by offering (or not) certain design features (i.e., affordances); yet these designs do not determine the outcomes. This overconfidence that technology can determine an outcome risks ignoring the more complex and nuanced forces shaping children’s online experiences. Moving forward requires abandoning the fallacy that we can simply “nerd harder” our way to youth safety—and instead embracing the more challenging work of developing comprehensive, nuanced approaches that recognize both the limitations and possibilities of technical intervention.

The Article is open access here.

Nerd Harder Website Graphic

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