Professor RonNell Andersen Jones is a University Distinguished Professor and the Lee E. Teitelbaum Chair in Law at the University of Utah. She is an Affiliated Fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project. For the 2023-24 academic year, she is a Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.

A former newspaper reporter and editor, Professor Andersen Jones is a First Amendment scholar who researches and writes on legal issues affecting the press and on the intersection between media and the courts, with an emphasis on the United States Supreme Court. Her work is particularly concerned with the role of the press in American democracy and the underdeveloped doctrines for identifying and safeguarding constitutionally protectable press functions in a changing media and political landscape. She is a widely cited national expert on newsgathering rights and commenter on the free-speech dynamics in social media discourse. Her scholarly work on questions of press access, the constitutional protections in media defamation suits, and the role of the press as a check on government has appeared in dozens of books and journals, including Northwestern Law Review, Michigan Law Review, UCLA Law Review, Minnesota Law Review, and the Harvard Law Review Forum.

Professor Andersen Jones is an elected member of the American Law Institute and an advisor to the ALI’s Third Restatement of Torts: Defamation and Privacy. She has twice served as chair of the Association of American Law Schools Section on Communication, Media & Information Law. She sits on the editorial board of two major communications journals and is the recipient of a number of scholarly awards, including the 2022 Harry W. Stonecipher Award for Distinguished Research on Media Law and Policy, the 2021 Presidential Societal Impact Scholar Award, and the 2018 S.J. Quinney Excellence in Research Award.

Professor Andersen Jones is also a frequent public commentator on press freedom issues. Her op-eds and other writing for popular audiences have appeared in The New York Times, Slate, NBC, CNN, and The Hill. She regularly provides legal analysis on MSNBC’s Deadline: White House and has appeared on CNN, NBC News, the PBS NewsHour, The Problem with Jon Stewart, NewsNation, National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, Public Radio International, the BBC, and Voice of America. She is routinely quoted on media-law and First Amendment matters in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, and her comments and research have also been featured in The Guardian, Slate, Vanity Fair, the Associated Press, Rolling Stone, Time, Politico, The Columbia Journalism Review, Bloomberg News, New York Magazine, The National Law Journal, Fortune, The Financial Times, Newsweek, Detroit News, SCOTUSBlog, and Politifact, along with the largest media outlets in Australia, Canada, Korea, and Japan.

Professor Andersen Jones graduated first in her law school class and clerked for the Honorable William A. Fletcher on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor on the United States Supreme Court. Prior to entering academia, she was an attorney in the Issues & Appeals section of Jones Day, where her work focused on Supreme Court litigation and included major constitutional cases.

An award-winning teacher, Professor Andersen Jones has been widely recognized for her classroom innovations and personal mentoring. In 2021, her First Amendment seminar was the subject of a feature in The New Yorker. In 2022, she received the Peter W. Billings Excellence in Teaching Award. Before joining the faculty at the University of Utah, she was Professor of Law and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs and Research at Brigham Young University, where she was twice named Professor of the Year and received the alumni teaching award. Before that, she was a Distinguished Faculty Fellow at the University of Arizona, where she team-taught an annual course about the United States Supreme Court with Justice O’Connor.