Tyler Valeska is in his second year with the First Amendment Clinic. Prior to his appointment at Cornell, he clerked for Judge Aleta Trauger, Middle District of Tennessee. Before clerking, he worked as a litigation associate in the Washington, D.C. office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP. Mr. Valeska is a graduate of Northwestern University School of Law, where he served as Executive Articles Editor of the Journal of Law & Social Policy, and the University of Alabama, where he was a University Fellow and a Blackburn Institute Fellow.
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An Introduction to Defamation Law
Foundational Principles and Current Developments
Saturday, August 29, 2020, 2pm EDT
Event Overview
This presentation provides a primer on the basics of defamation law. Since the Supreme Court’s seminal 1964 decision in New York Times v. Sullivan, courts and commentators have interpreted the First Amendment as providing expansive protections for speakers—particularly the press—so that debate on issues of public importance is “uninhibited, robust, and wide-open.” We’ll walk through the current doctrinal frameworks for evaluating defamation claims, discuss the competing values underlying these frameworks, and explore modern developments in defamation law—including the current threat to Sullivan itself. This presentation is meant to be interactive: using hypotheticals and examples from the Clinic’s cases, attendees will have the opportunity to apply newly-learned principles of defamation law to concrete examples in real time.
What You'll Learn
- What is defamation?
- What are the countervailing values at stake in defamation cases?
- Who does the current doctrinal framework protect, and why?
- How is defamation law evolving?
Speaker
First Amendment Fellow
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