Phone: 217-333-5461
Email: agajda@uiuc.edu
B.A. University of Michigan
J.D. Wayne State University
Courses
Law and Journalism
Privacy and Defamation
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Professor Gajda teaches in both the College of Communications and the College of Law. Her primary research interests relate to freedom of expression and the First Amendment. She specializes in the intersection of law and journalism, particularly privacy, ethics, and the legal regulation of newsgathering. Her first book, The Legalization of Academia, exploring academic freedom and the rule of law within universities, is under contract with Harvard University Press. In addition to workshops and talks throughout the United States, Professor Gajda presented a paper examining the contested status of the reporter's privilege in U.S. law at a conference at Wuhan University in China on international media transformation. She organized and moderated a panel on legal journalism at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Law Schools. In the summer of 2007, she will present papers on privacy and the legal understanding of news value at the annual meetings of the Law and Society Association in Berlin, and the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) in Washington. Professor Gajda is also the legal commentator for National Public Radio stations in Illinois. Her weekly commentaries, Legal Issues in the News with Amy Gajda, have won seven Associated Press awards and are published as a regular column in The News-Gazette, Champaign-Urbana's regional newspaper. An opinion piece on campaign finance practices she wrote for The New York Times became the basis for a 60 Minutes investigative report. She also anchors Illinois Law, a television interview program that focuses on timely legal issues and airs on WCIA-TV, the CBS affiliate in Champaign-Urbana, and on the Illinois Channel statewide. Before attending law school, Professor Gajda worked for many years as a television journalist, anchoring and producing newscasts and reporting for television stations affiliated with every major network. She continued to anchor on a part-time basis in Detroit while a law student at Wayne State University, before finishing her studies at Georgetown University Law Center. Before joining the Illinois faculty, she practiced law with Miles & Stockbridge in Washington, D.C. She is the 2006-2007 Professional Freedom and Responsibility Chair for the Law and Policy Division of AEJMC; in 2007-2008, she will serve as the Law and Policy Research Chair. She is an affiliated faculty member with the Women and Gender in Global Perspectives Program at the University of Illinois. She is a member of the bars of the District of Columbia, Virginia, and Michigan. In Spring 2008, she will be visiting at Brooklyn Law School.
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