Amy Gajda

Biography

Professor Gajda is a journalist turned lawyer recognized internationally for her expertise in privacy and media law. Much of her scholarship explores the tensions between social regulation of access to information and First Amendment values, particularly the shifting boundaries of press freedoms and rising public anxieties about the erosion of privacy. 

Viking published Professor Gajda’s Seek and Hide: The Tangled History of the Right to Privacy in 2022 to significant critical acclaim. The New York Times called it “wry and fascinating” and named it as one of the 100 most notable books of the year; the courts of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit chose it as the Circuit’s inaugural “One Court. One Book” summer reading. Harvard University Press published her two earlier books, The First Amendment Bubble and The Trials of Academe. 

Professor Gajda’s scholarly articles have appeared in journals that include the American Historical Review, California Law Review, Georgia Law Review, Indiana Law Journal, and Washington Law Review. She is an author of the leading casebooks Media Law (Foundation Press) and Law and Higher Education (Carolina Academic Press), and has contributed chapters to numerous edited volumes. Professor Gajda is also currently serving as an adviser on the American Law Institute’s new Restatement on Defamation and Privacy, a multi-year project. 

On the journalism side, Professor Gajda’s opinion pieces have appeared in The New York Times, Wired, Slate, Time, the Daily Beast, and the New York Daily News, among others, and she is regularly quoted and appears in media including The Guardian, The New Yorker, Marketplace, C-SPAN, and the CBS Morning News. Her earlier weekly radio commentaries on legal issues won seven Associated Press awards.

Before joining Brooklyn Law School’s faculty in 2023, Gajda was the Class of 1937 Professor of Law at Tulane Law School, where she won the highest teaching awards offered by both the law school and the university , especially significant to her as a first-generation college student. Before that, she taught at the University of Illinois in both its law school and its journalism school  where she was consistently named to the List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Their Students. Before law school, she worked as a television news anchor and reporter in cities mainly in the Northeast. After attending law school in Detroit, the city where she grew up, she practiced law in Washington, D.C. 

Professor Gajda has been a visiting professor at several universities in Europe and Asia, teaching mainly privacy law and media law. She has chaired the Association of American Law Schools’ Section on Defamation and Privacy and its Section on Communication, Media & Information Law, and also led the Law and Policy Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.