Division Awards
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Announcements
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MAY 2023: STONECIPHER AWARD ANNOUNCEMENT
An article by RonNell Andersen Jones and Sonja R. West, The U.S. Supreme Court's Characterizations of the Press: An Empirical Study, has been selected as the winner of the 2022 Harry W. Stonecipher Award for Distinguished Research on Media Law and Policy.
Jones is the Lee E. Teitelbaum Professor of Law at the University of Utah and West is the Otis Brumby Distinguished Professor in First Amendment Law at the University of Georgia. Their article was published in the North Carolina Law Review.
The research by Jones and West was deemed by a panel of peer reviewers to be the article that best exemplified the criteria of the Stonecipher Award due to its potential to have a lasting impact on freedom of expression scholarship. Contest judges cited the comprehensive nature of the work by Jones and West to re-examine every reference to the press made by the Supreme Court in its opinions since 1784. The article revealed novel and nuanced understandings of the treatment of the press by the Supreme Court as a whole as well as by individual justices. The researchers concluded there has been deterioration in the Court’s attitude toward the press, as measured in a variety of ways and looking at both quantity and quality.
The award will be presented at the Law and Policy Division business meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication conference in Washington, D.C., in August 2023. The Stonecipher Award comes with a $1,000 prize.
The award honors the legacy of Harry W. Stonecipher, a leading media law scholar and teacher. Stonecipher published numerous academic journal articles on a variety of topics relating to the First Amendment and media regulation. He also mentored a number of distinguished media law scholars during his 15-year career at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, beginning in 1969. Stonecipher died in 2004.
The annual Stonecipher Award for Distinguished Research on Media Law and Policy is open to all journalism, First Amendment and communications scholars within and outside AEJMC.
Finalists for the 2022 Stonecipher Award include:
- Matthew Bunker and Emily Erickson, “Of Circuit Splits, Dictionaries & Legal Essences: The Right of Publicity as ‘Intellectual Property’,” UCLA Entertainment Law Review.
- Erin K. Coyle, “Evaluating Methods to Protect Sex Crime Victims' Privacy: A Legal Analysis of States' Attempts to Protect Victims' Identities,” Communication Law and Policy.
- Amanda Shanor and Sarah E. Light, “Greenwashing and the First Amendment,” Columbia Law Review.