RonNell Andersen Jones

RonNell Andersen Jones is a University Distinguished Professor and Teitelbaum Chair in Law at the University of Utah and an Affiliated Fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project. 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 the media and the courts. She is one of the foremost scholars on American press freedom, with work that addresses the role of journalism as a check on government and the constitutional and statutory rights of newsgatherers. She is a widely cited national expert on media defamation suits. Professor Andersen Jones’s scholarship has appeared in numerous books and journals, including Northwestern Law Review, Michigan Law Review, UCLA Law Review, Washington University Law Review, and the Harvard Law Review Forum, and she is co-editor of “The Future of Press Freedom: Democracy, Law, and the News in Changing Times,” forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. She is a frequent commentator on media-law matters for MSNBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and The Wall Street Journal. During the 2023-24 academic year, Professor Andersen Jones was a Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. During Trinity Term 2025, she will be a research visitor at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights at Oxford University.