The Michael Hoefges Scholarship honors the life and legacy of Dr. Michael Hoefges, a respected media law scholar, teacher, and mentor whose work shaped generations of students at the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media.

Dr. Hoefges joined the UNC faculty in 2003, where he taught undergraduate and graduate media law courses and helped build the M.A./ J.D. and Ph.D./ J.D. dual degree programs. He was the founding co-coordinator of that program and served as an adviser to students pursuing both journalism and law.

Dr. Hoefges passed away on March 9, 2021, after a long battle with cancer, but his influence remains deeply felt by former students, colleagues, and the wider media law community. His research focused on First Amendment commercial and corporate speech, advertising and marketing regulation, access to government records, and freedom of information law. Before entering academia, he practiced as a civil litigation defense attorney in Florida and later taught media law at Trinity University, the University of Tennessee, and then UNC Chapel Hill.

The Michael Hoefges Scholarship was created to honor Dr. Hoefges’ lasting impact at the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media and to support students whose academic and professional interests reflect the areas he cared about most. 

While the exact amount may vary from year to year depending on available funding and annual award decisions, the scholarship provides meaningful financial support to Hussman students as they continue their research, studies, and professional development. 

Past recipients of the Michael Hoefges Scholarship reflect the wide range of work being done by students and alumni connected to the fields of media law, journalism, communication policy, technology, and public life. 

Past recipients include:

2022 & 2023

Evan Ringel 

J.D., M.A. and Ph.D. in Media and Communication

Dr. Evan Ringel is an Assistant Professor of Media Law at Appalachian State University. His research explores the First Amendment, emerging technologies, civil rights, and state level regulation. He earned his J.D., M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill through the UNC School of Law and the Hussman School of Journalism and Media. Dr. Ringel has also worked closely with the UNC Center for Media Law and Policy and has published research on election related speech and facial recognition technology. 

Noelle Wilson

J.D./M.A. Dual Degree

Noelle Wilson is now an associate attorney at Goodwin. Her interests center on issues at the intersection of law and communication technology. During law school, she served as an editor on the North Carolina Law Review and as an Honors Writing Scholar. She also gained legal experience through internships with the United States Department of Justice, Civil Division, Consumer Protection Branch, the Federal Communications Commission, and the United States District Court for the Western District of North Carolina. 

2024

Jessica Shaw

Ph.D. in Media and Communication

Dr. Jessica Shaw is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Advertising and Public Relations at Temple University’s Klein College of Media and Communication. She earned her Ph.D. in Media and Communication from UNC Chapel Hill in 2025. Dr. Shaw’s teaching and research are shaped by her background in journalism, public relations, nonprofit, and government communication. Her scholarship examines public understanding, responsibility, media ethics, privacy fatigue, and regulatory communication around data protection.

2025

Skylar Bandoly

Skylar Bandoly is a first year Ph.D. student at the Hussman School of Journalism and Media at UNC Chapel Hill. Her journalism background includes work at The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Georgia Public Broadcasting, and Scripps. Bandoly has also taught as a journalism adjunct instructor at the University of Georgia, connecting her newsroom experience with her work as an educator and scholar. Her research interests center on media law, press freedom, and legal protections for journalists.

Together, the recipients reflect the purpose of the scholarship: to support students whose work carries forward Dr. Hoefges’ commitment to scholarship, teaching, and public service. By supporting students at Hussman, the award keeps his influence alive in the classrooms, research projects, and careers of those following in his footsteps.

This year’s first-place winner is Anne (Sutton) Orndorff for her article titled “A Woman’s Right to Know, But Not to Choose: Revisiting HB854 in the Wake of Dobbs and NIFLA.” The award comes with a $1,000 cash prize.

Sutton’s Note examines abortion informed-consent laws, focusing on North Carolina’s HB854 and the Fourth Circuit’s decision in Stuart v. Camnitz. She argues that abortion “informed consent” has increasingly been used as a tool of ideological pressure rather than genuine patient education. The piece traces the doctrinal history from City of Akron, Thornburgh, and Casey through Rounds and Lakey, then contrasts those cases with Stuart, which treated the law as compelled speech and applied intermediate scrutiny. The Note’s central claim is that NIFLA and Dobbs undermine the Fifth and Eighth Circuits’ reliance on Casey and make a fresh First Amendment analysis necessary. It concludes that many abortion “informed consent” laws are not true informed-consent regulations at all and should be vulnerable under the First Amendment.

Sutton is a graduating third-year student from the University of North Carolina School of Law. Originally from Charlotte, North Carolina, she attended the University of Richmond where she majored in History and minored in Latin American, Latino & Iberian studies. During her time at Richmond, she also served as a captain of the Division I field hockey team. At Carolina Law, she served as president of the Carolina Law Ambassadors and a Note Editor for the First Amendment Law Review. After graduation, she will join a commercial real estate firm in Raleigh.

This year’s second-place winner is Owen Breen for his article titled “Lights, Camera, Arrest! Sharpe v. Winterville Police Department Represents a Novel Collision of Law Enforcement Priorities and the First Amendment.” The award comes with a $500 cash prize.

Owen’s Note analyzes Sharpe v. Winterville Police Department, a Fourth Circuit case involving a passenger who attempted to livestream a traffic stop. He frames the case as a conflict between the public’s First Amendment interest in recording police and law enforcement’s interest in officer safety during traffic stops. The piece surveys the broader right-to-record jurisprudence, including Glik, Gericke, Fields, Project Veritas, and Irizarry, and discusses how time, place, and manner limits and obstruction statutes shape the doctrine. It also explores the Fourth Amendment implications of traffic stops and argues that livestreaming during an active stop may create unique safety risks that justify some limits. The Note ultimately takes a more skeptical view of expansive recording rights in this context, especially where livestreaming may interfere with police duties.

Owen is a 2026 graduate of the University of North Carolina School of Law. Born and raised in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, he now lives in Wilmington, North Carolina. Previously, he graduated from Emory University’s Goizueta Business School in 2023 with a Bachelor of Business Administration degree and a double major in Political Science. While at Carolina Law, he was a staff writer on the First Amendment Law Review. Owen is passionate about First Amendment issues, politics, and current affairs. He will join Phelps Dunbar as an Associate Attorney in its Raleigh office in the fall.

On April 6, the UNC Center for Media Law and Policy will host the 2026 Hargrove Media Law and Policy Colloquium, featuring Kevin Martin, vice president and head of global policy at Meta and former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. Titled

Mr. Martin brings a rare combination of senior government, private practice, and global policy experience to this conversation. He served two terms as commissioner and chairman of the FCC during a period of significant transformation in telecommunications, broadband, and media regulation. Before joining the FCC, he worked at the White House as a Special Assistant to the President for Economic Policy and as a member of the National Economic Council staff, where he focused on commerce and technology policy. He also represented the United States on the G‑8 Digital Opportunity Task Force, addressing how the digital revolution could expand opportunity in developing countries. After leaving government service, Mr. Martin was a partner and co-chair of the telecommunications practice at an international law firm before joining Meta, where he now leads global engagement with policymakers on privacy, connectivity, trade, and related issues.

In addition to delivering prepared remarks, Mr. Martin will sit down for a conversation with Julia Ambrose, who clerked for Associate Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and now leads the media law practice at Brooks, Pierce, McLendon, Humphrey & Leonard, LLP. Their discussion will examine the practical and philosophical tensions between regulation and innovation, the growing importance of international policy considerations, and the role lawyers play in advising clients amid regulatory uncertainty and global competition.

Designed for lawyers, media and technology industry leaders, policymakers, and students, the evening will offer a thoughtful and timely examination of the regulatory choices shaping the future of media and communications. The event will also highlight the enduring relevance of media law and policy education at a moment when regulatory decisions increasingly influence innovation, democratic values, and economic growth worldwide.

The colloquium will take place on April 6 at 7:00 p.m. at the Paul J. Rizzo Conference Center, 130 DuBose Home Lane, Chapel Hill, NC 27517. The event is free and open to the public, though advance registration is encouraged due to limited seating. Registration is available here.

For more information on the Colloquium, please visit our event page.

The prize competition is open to all college and university students. Up to three winners will be selected, with a first prize of $1,000, a second prize of $500, and a third prize of $250. The prizes will be awarded to the authors of published papers that most creatively and convincingly propose solutions to significant problems in the field of media law and policy.  We define this subject matter broadly, including copyright, trademark, social media regulation, and First Amendment speech and press issues. All methodologies are welcome.

The deadline for submission is April 30, 2026.

Rules

1. The author of the submitted publication must have been enrolled in a graduate or undergraduate degree-granting program in the United States at the time the article was accepted for publication. This includes, but is not limited to, students enrolled in M.A. and Ph.D. programs, law school (including J.D., LL.M., and J.S.D. candidates), and other professional schools (including M.B.A. candidates).
2. The submitted paper must have been published in a law review or peer-reviewed journal during the 2025 calendar year.
3. Each student may submit only one entry.
4. Jointly authored papers are eligible, provided all authors meet the eligibility requirements for the competition. If a winning paper has more than one author, the prize will be split equally among the co-authors. No work with a faculty co-author will be considered.
5. Each entry must be the original work of the listed author(s). The author(s) must perform all of the key tasks of identifying the topic, researching it, analyzing it, formulating positions and arguments, and writing and revising the paper.
6. Papers will be evaluated based on a number of factors, including thoroughness of research and analysis, relevance to the competition topic, relevance to current legal and/ or public policy debates, originality of thought, and clarity of expression.
7. The prize will be monetary. Winners will be required to submit a completed W-9, affidavit of eligibility, tax acknowledgment, and liability release for tax purposes as a condition of receiving the cash prize.
8. In the unlikely event that entries are of insufficient quality to merit an award, the Center for Media Law and Policy reserves the right not to award some or all of the prizes.

Submission Process

• All entries must be received by 11:59 p.m. EST on April 30, 2026.
• Entries must be sent via email to medialaw[at]unc.edu with the following in the subject line: “James R. Cleary Prize Submission: [Name of Author]”
• Papers should be submitted in Portable Document Format (.pdf).
• Entries MUST include a signed cover sheet that may be downloaded from the Center for Media Law Policy’s website here.

A review committee comprised of faculty and affiliates from the UNC Center for Media Law and Policy will review the submissions and determine the winning paper(s). The decisions of the committee are final. Winners will be notified and final results will appear on the Center’s website in late spring. Due to the large number of expected entries, the Center cannot contact all non-winning entrants.

For more information, please visit our Cleary Competition page.

What the Research Explores

State governments have introduced a patchwork of social media safety laws that impose technical mandates on online platforms — especially aimed at enhancing user protections such as youth safety. While well-intentioned, these regulations do not simply add compliance costs as jurisdictions pile on more rules. Instead:

• Each new state requirement interacts with every other, creating multiplicative — not additive — technical burdens for platforms.

• This exponential growth in complexity stems from a combinatorial reality: as more distinct regulations are introduced, the number of potential conflicts and design constraints multiplies rapidly.

• Smaller platforms and new market entrants are particularly disadvantaged, as they face disproportionately high engineering and operational costs to satisfy conflicting rules across jurisdictions.

• Ironically, regulatory fragmentation may also undermine the very safeguards these laws are meant to provide, by incentivizing workarounds and fragmenting the user experience.

Why It Matters

This research highlights a critical, often overlooked dimension of digital policy: the interactions between laws matter just as much as the content of the laws themselves. By applying mathematical reasoning to regulation, this work provides policymakers, researchers, and technologists with a new lens for assessing the real-world effects of decentralized digital governance.

The paper contributes to debates on platform regulation, digital governance, and the economics of compliance: topics that are central to recent legislative efforts across the U.S. and around the world.

Read the Paper

The full paper (58 pages) is available on SSRN.

Here is the full abstract:

Public access to court records is a cornerstone of democratic governance, enabling public oversight of the judiciary and fostering confidence in the rule of law. Despite a strong presumption in favor of openness under both the First Amendment and common law, the sealing of federal court records has become widespread, often with minimal judicial scrutiny. Recent investigations have revealed that excessive court secrecy shields government and corporate misconduct, conceals vital public-safety information, and erodes public confidence in the courts.

This Article presents the first comprehensive analysis of the local rules governing sealing in all 94 federal districts, reviewing more than 700 provisions in both civil and criminal rules. The findings are concerning: Nearly half of all districts lack general sealing rules, many fail to reference the controlling legal standard, and basic procedural safeguards—such as public notice, consideration of alternatives to sealing, and case-specific identification of harms—are frequently absent. These deficiencies have created a patchwork of inconsistent, often toothless rules that enable secrecy to spread largely unchecked.

Without changes to federal rules, court-ordered secrecy will continue to erode public trust and obscure the work of the federal courts. This Article proposes three core principles to guide this reform. First, substantive clarity: Every rule governing sealing should expressly affirm the presumption of public access and incorporate, at a minimum, the common law’s requirements for sealing. Second, procedural rigor: Rules should require public notice of sealing requests, an opportunity for objections, identification of specific harms, consideration of less-restrictive alternatives, and mechanisms for periodic review and unsealing. Third, administrative efficiency: Rules should require parties to limit the frequency and narrow the scope of their sealing re-quests, explore redaction as an alternative, and certify their efforts to minimize the need for sealing.

You can download the article from SSRN or from the Journal of Free Speech Law.

Posted on behalf of Eugene Volokh and James Weinstein:

Are you a law student, judicial law clerk, lawyer, or beginning academic hoping to publish a journal article on free speech law? Would you like the opportunity to get advice about your draft from leading free speech scholars?

If so, send us your draft by Sunday, August 16, 2026. (This should still be a draft article, not an article that’s already published or expected to be published within six months.) We plan to select the submissions that we think are particularly promising, and invite their authors to a workshop where they can present their papers and get helpful feedback on them. The workshop will be Saturday, October 24, 2026 (with dinner the night before) at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law in Phoenix, and we will inform the selected authors by Tuesday, September 8, 2026.

We have funds to pay for transportation and lodging for the selected authors’ trips. Eligibility is limited to people who have so far published three or fewer law-related journal articles.

We also plan to officially recognize zero to three of the top articles among those we review. If the authors wish, they can also have their articles reviewed for publication in the Journal of Free Speech Law (http://JournalOfFreeSpeechLaw.org), presumably after they revise the articles in light of the workshop feedback.

If you’re interested, please submit your draft at http://tinyurl.com/aspiring-free-speech (Google logon required). Please single-space, and format the article nicely, so we can more easily read it.

Please do not include your name or law school affiliation in the document or document filename, and please do not include an author’s note thanking your advisors and others. Please make your filename be the title of your article (or some recognizable subset of the article title). We want to review the article drafts without knowing the authors’ identities.

If you have questions, please check http://tinyurl.com/aspiring-free-speech-faq; if your question isn’t answered there, please e-mail volokh@stanford.edu.

Many thanks to the Stanton Foundation for its generous support.

* * *

James Weinstein, Dan Cracchiolo Chair in Constitutional Law and Professor of Law, Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, Arizona State University

Eugene Volokh, Thomas M. Siebel Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution (Stanford University), and Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus, UCLA School of Law

Our analysis demonstrates three interdependent patterns: (1) the checklist fallacy (reducing safety to discrete technical features), (2) the false promise of age verification (assuming identity verification will prevent harm), and (3) the design determinism myth (overestimating design’s power to shape social outcomes).

The appeal of techno-legal solutionism transcends borders–from California to Brussels, it offers policymakers seemingly clear solutions to complex problems. However, our analysis shows that this approach fundamentally misunderstands both the social shaping of technology and the complexity of youth well-being. Technologies can influence outcomes by offering (or not) certain design features (i.e., affordances); yet these designs do not determine the outcomes. This overconfidence that technology can determine an outcome risks ignoring the more complex and nuanced forces shaping children’s online experiences. Moving forward requires abandoning the fallacy that we can simply “nerd harder” our way to youth safety—and instead embracing the more challenging work of developing comprehensive, nuanced approaches that recognize both the limitations and possibilities of technical intervention.

The Article is open access here.

Join us for CLE credits (Campus Life Experience), food, and thought-provoking discussions.

Here are some highlights:

• The day kicks off with an invitation to read from banned books, presented in collaboration with SILS and the University Libraries
• A voter registration drive will be hosted by the UNC Office of Student Life & Leadership
• A panel of industry experts tackle questions around what responsible use of AI looks like for the future of journalism
• Test your First Amendment knowledge and enjoy free pizza at our 1A Day trivia contest!
• Interested in true crime podcasting? Join a webinar for an insider’s look at the complex legal landscape of true crime media
• Worried about democratic backsliding? In collaboration with the What’s at Stake project, join a candid discussion with CITAP colleagues on the role of First Amendment freedoms in protecting democracy
• How do we balance religious freedoms in an increasingly diverse America? Join this webinar to explore possible paths toward ensuring religious liberty for all Americans
• Keynote: Stories from the Field— a compelling conversation between distinguished journalists and a First Amendment expert

Bring your students and your questions. You won’t find a smarter group of folks talking about these critical issues!

Imagine that a future U.S. President, upset about negative press coverage and plummeting approval ratings, issues an executive order instructing all federal agencies to henceforth provide no public access to executive branch records and meetings. Imagine further that the President’s party controls both chambers of Congress, which rescinds all statutory disclosure obligations imposed on the executive branch, including the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), Government in the Sunshine Act, and Presidential Records Act. Is the public’s ability to understand the actions of government solely a matter for their elected representatives to decide? Disturbingly, many courts and scholars seem to think so.

If the government attempts to keep its citizens in the dark, or even actively misleads them, how can this not strike at the very heart of the Constitution? I argue in this Article that a right to know about the government is fundamental to the Constitution’s system of checks and balances. While past scholarship has largely grounded the right to know in the First Amendment, this Article advances a more foundational claim: the Framers’ unwavering commitment to popular sovereignty demands that the people have a right to know about their government. Recognizing a right to know as a constitutional imperative, rooted in the people’s sovereign authority, establishes a durable foundation for limited government—one that ensures that citizens can hold their leaders accountable and fully exercise their role in self-government.

Implementing a right to know about the government will present many challenges. Fortunately, we can draw guidance from the Supreme Court’s cases applying a public right of access to the courts, and we have decades of experience with open government statutes such as FOIA and the Sunshine Act. Building on this foundation, I lay out three core principles that should guide the development of a right to know about the government. First, a right to know should be limited in scope and extend only so far as is necessary to fulfill the needs of democratic self-government. Second, even when a right to know applies, it should yield when countervailing interests are sufficiently weighty. Third, the government must have leeway in designing access policies and procedures that account for the practical realities of providing public access.

You can download the article from SSRN.