With free speech debates raging on college campuses and journalists under attack, Cornell Law School is launching a First Amendment clinic under the leadership of former Dow Jones General Counsel Mark Jackson.

Jackson, a First Amendment expert and a 1984 graduate of the law school, is overseeing the clinic at the request of Dean Eduardo Peñalver. Jackson hopes the clinic — one of a growing number with such an emphasis — will have a national impact although it will primarily represent clients in upstate New York, western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio.

“We are really excited to have the Cornell program coming online in the fall.” said Bruce Brown, a former partner in the D.C. offices of Baker & Hostetler and the executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. “It just feels in so many different ways like our moment.”

The Cornell clinic and clinics launching in the fall at Vanderbilt, Duke and Arizona State law schools are needed to counter the Trump administration's attacks on the press, meet American Bar Association requirements for experiential learning and help state and local journalists who don't have access to lawyers, Brown said.

“That is a lot of new capacity coming online and that is extremely encouraging to us who've been working in this area for the last couple of years,” Brown said.

Under the auspices of the Reporters Committee, the Cornell clinic, The Civil Liberties & Transparency Clinic at the University at Buffalo School of Law and other such clinics and nonprofits are forming a nationwide coalition to serve as a clearinghouse for journalists. The coalition is so new, in fact, that it doesn't yet have a name.

“In addition to the sharing of resources among the members of the network, we're also hoping to develop a referral system,” Brown said. “If we can't handle a case or if a case is not right for us, we'd now be in a position to refer that to someone else in the network.”

Cornell, for its part, has already secured funding from the Stanton Foundation, which supports First Amendment causes. But, Peñalver said, the school is looking to its donors and alumni network to raise more money. It's unclear exactly how many students will be participating because that depends on how much is raised to hire fellows to oversee the students' work.

“The next several months will be a time to consult with people in the industry — media outlets, journalists, not for profits, our clinic network and the advisory committee of Cornell professors — to determine our initial docket of cases,” Jackson said. “And I expect that the clinic will develop organically its areas of specialty based on its own experiences, the needs of its clients and developments on the local, state and national level.”

With an explosion of citizen bloggers, a proliferation of freelance journalists and a decline in revenues at media companies, the clinic will play an essential role in keeping the government from interfering with a free press, Jackson said.

“Our clinic will be taking on the sort of work for journalists and publications that might have been done in house 30 or 40 years ago because they could afford it, said Michael Dorf, a Cornell Law professor who is on the steering committee overseeing the clinic.

“My own view is that we ought to be focusing our attention on protecting independents reporters,” he said. “Even after the trends that I describe, you're still better off if you're working for an establishment paper rather than out on your own,”

While the biggest media outlets have in-house lawyers, that doesn't mean they won't benefit from the clinic's work. Jackson said he will look to lawyers at the largest media corporations for suggestions about cases that will move the law more in journalists' favor.

The big effort underway at Cornell was originally the idea of a student, Peñalver said.

“I knew that Mark had recently retired from Dow Jones and the ambition for it grew from there. He's taken the idea and run with it and developed an impressive proposal and helped us with fundraising, Peñalver said.

“It's such a vibrant area of law right now and I think it will spark student interest and the hope for the clinic is it will educate a generation of lawyers who are pursuing careers about freedom of the press,” he said.