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LAWRENCE -- First Amendment scholar, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, author and former New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis will be the featured speaker for the 16th annual Media and the Law Seminar scheduled for Friday, April 25, in Kansas City, Mo.
The seminar is sponsored by the University of Kansas and the Kansas City Metropolitan Bar Association Media Law Committee, with contributions from Media/Professional Insurance, the Kansas City Star and First Media Insurance Specialists Inc.
Registration is available online, by phone (785) 864-KUCE (5823) or toll free (877) 404-KUCE (5823), or by e-mail at kuce@ku.edu.
Each spring the seminar draws close to 300 members of the legal and journalism professions from across the country. Topics of this year's seminar are prepublication review, reporter's privilege and fringe media, mediation strategies, criminal libel, political speech and ethical dilemmas for media lawyers.
Panel discussions of those topics will be led by experts, including freelance writer Vanessa Leggett. Leggett was released from federal custody in Houston, Texas, Jan. 4 after serving 168 days in jail for refusing to testify before a federal grand jury and turn over her research materials. A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals sitting in Houston upheld a July 20 contempt order against Leggett on Aug. 17, finding that reporter's privilege did not apply to Leggett because she was not a "journalist." She asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review the case, but her request was rejected.
Other panel participants include John Seigenthaler, founder of the First Amendment Center (Freedom Forum) at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn.; Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press in Arlington, Va.; Gordon Yamate, general counsel to Knight Ridder in San Jose, Calif.; and Jack Goodman, general counsel to the National Association of Broadcasters in Washington, D.C.
Lewis, a columnist for the New York Times from 1969 to 2001, won his first Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 1955 as a reporter for the Washington Daily News. He then joined the Times and won a second Pulitzer Prize in 1963 for coverage of the Supreme Court. He has written three books: "Gideon's Trumpet," about a landmark Supreme Court case; "Portrait of a Decade," about the great changes in American race relations; and "Make No Law: The Sullivan Case and the First Amendment." For 15 years he taught a course on the Constitution and the press at Harvard Law School.
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