Clay Calvert

Brechner Eminent Scholar in Mass Communication, University of Florida

Clay Calvert is the Brechner Eminent Scholar in Mass Communication and Director of the Marion B. Brechner First Amendment Project at the University of Florida.

In Spring 2011, Professor Calvert served as Visiting Professor of Law at the University of the Pacific McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento, where he taught two sections of Constitutional Law II, covering equal protection, substantive due process and freedom of expression.

Calvert has authored or co-authored more than 130 law journal articles on topics related to freedom of expression. He has published articles in journals affiliated with the law schools at Boston University, Columbia, Duke, Harvard, Georgetown, New York University, Northwestern, University of California Berkeley, University of California Los Angeles, University of Pennsylvania, University of Southern California, University of Virginia, Vanderbilt and William & Mary, among others.

In 2016, Calvert captured a veritable academic triple crown, winning top faculty awards for papers submitted to the law divisions at the Broadcast Education Association conference (Las Vegas), the AEJMC Southeast Colloquium (Baton Rouge) and the AEJMC annual conference (Minneapolis).

As director of the Marion B. Brechner First Amendment Project, Calvert has filed, as counsel of record, multiple friend-of-the-court briefs with the United States Supreme Court in cases such as Elonis v. United States and Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association.

Since 2015, his op-ed commentaries have appeared in Fortune, Huffington Post, Newsweek, New Republic and The Conversation.

Professor Calvert is co-author, along with Don R. Pember, of the market-leading undergraduate media law textbook, Mass Media Law, 19th ed. (McGraw-Hill), and is author of the book Voyeur Nation: Media, Privacy, and Peering in Modern Culture (Westview Press, 2000).

He received his J.D. with Great Distinction in 1991 from the University of the Pacific's McGeorge School of Law and then earned a Ph.D. in 1996 in Communication from Stanford University, where he also completed his undergraduate work with a B.A. in Communication in 1987. He is a member of both the State Bar of California and the Bar of the Supreme Court of the United States.