Education

• BA, The University of Michigan
• JD, Wayne State University

Biography

Amy Gajda is recognized internationally for her expertise in privacy, media law, torts, and the law of higher education; her scholarship explores the tensions between social regulation and First Amendment values. 

Gajda’s first book, The Trials of Academe (Harvard 2009), examines public oversight of colleges and universities and its impact on academic freedom.  Her later work draws on insights from her many years as an award-winning journalist and focuses on the shifting boundaries of press freedoms, particularly in light of the digital disruption of traditional media and rising public anxieties about the erosion of privacy.  Her second book, The First Amendment Bubble: How Privacy and Paparazzi Threaten a Free Press (Harvard 2015), explores these boundaries in the context of judicial oversight of journalistic news judgment.  She is presently at work on a third book, The Secret History of the Right to Privacy, under contract with Viking and slated to be published in 2021.

Gajda’s scholarly articles have appeared in journals including the American Historical Review, California Law Review, Georgia Law Review, Indiana Law Journal, and Washington Law Review, among many others.  She has published opinion pieces in The New York Times, Slate, and New York Daily News, among others, and is regularly quoted in media ranging from The Guardian and The New Yorker to the CBS Morning News.  She is a co-author of the leading casebooks Media Law (Foundation Press 2016) and Law and Higher Education (Carolina Academic Press 2015). 

Before joining Tulane’s faculty in 2010, Gajda held faculty appointments in both the law and journalism schools at the University of Illinois and practiced law in Washington, D.C.  She has been a visiting professor at Brooklyn Law School and at law schools in Europe and China.  She is admitted to practice in the District of Columbia, Virginia, and her home state of Michigan. She has chaired the Association of American Law Schools’ Section on Defamation and Privacy and its Section on Mass Communication twice, and she has also led the Law and Policy Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.

She is a past winner of the Felix Frankfurter Award for Distinguished Teaching, Tulane Law School’s highest teaching honor.  She was a first-generation college student and is the first in her family to become a lawyer.