UCI IP, Arts & Tech Clinic

Intellectual Property, Arts, & Technology Clinic

IPAT Joins California Voter Foundation’s 25th Anniversary Celebration

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Yesterday, we traveled to Sacramento, CA to celebrate IPAT Clinic client California Voter Foundation‘s 25th anniversary celebration. In addition to 25th anniversary awards, the event featured a retrospective video illustrating CVF’s huge impact on voting in California over 25 years. A great time was had by all! 

 

IPAT Certified Law Students Hannah Green and Prachi Mistry with CVF Executive Director Kim Alexander and IPAT Clinic Director Jack Lerner

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CVF board member Cathy Darling Allen with CVF president Kim Alexander

 

 

UCI Law Granted $450,000 to Expand IPAT Clinic’s Press Freedom and Transparency Work

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The University of California, Irvine School of Law (UCI Law) is pleased to announce a grant of $450,000 from the Legal Clinic Fund, a collaborative fund housed at The Miami Foundation, to support its Intellectual Property, Arts, and Technology Clinic (IPAT)’s press freedom and transparency work. The grant will fund free legal services to independent journalists and media organizations in California. Susan E. Seager, a veteran First Amendment litigator, former journalist, and staff attorney at the UCI Law IPAT Clinic, will lead this practice. The UCI Law IPAT Clinic is the first and only clinic on the West Coast with a practice dedicated specifically to press freedom and transparency.

“In today’s challenging media environment, the work of independent journalists has never been more important—and their legal needs have never been more urgent,” said Clinical Professor of Law and IPAT Clinic Director Jack Lerner. “We are delighted that with this generous funding, the Clinic can expand its work with journalists, filmmakers, and media organizations.”

The UCI Law IPAT Clinic’s Press Freedom and Transparency team defends First Amendment rights for independent journalists and media organizations and fights for government transparency, while training law students in practical lawyering skills. IPAT Clinic students have provided pre-publication review of journalists’ investigative articles, filed motions in court to unseal court records, and went undercover to test Orange County’s adherence to California’s sunshine law.

In January 2019, IPAT Clinic students won a First Amendment motion in Kern County Superior Court, persuading the judge during oral argument to declare that a gag order did not bar a Bakersfield journalist from reporting about a high-profile criminal trial. IPAT Clinic students also won disclosure of government records earlier this year revealing how social workers failed to protect a 10-year-old Los Angeles boy from years of alleged physical abuse; the Clinic’s client published a lengthy story about the boy based in part on the documents obtained by the Clinic.

“The UCI Law IPAT Clinic tackles some of the most significant challenges facing First Amendment rights, especially as emerging technologies rapidly change the world,” said UCI Law Dean and Chancellor’s Professor of Law L. Song Richardson. “We are tremendously grateful for the partnership and generous support from the Legal Clinic Fund to help us advocate for justice in media law.”

“This grant is being put to work immediately as UCI Law provides expanded legal help to journalists in their fight against government secrecy, perseverance in the face of threats and intimidation, and vindication of their First Amendment rights,” Prof. Seager said.

Prof. Seager, a Yale Law graduate, is a seasoned media law litigator, working at Davis Wright Tremaine in Los Angeles from 1999 to 2007 and from 2018 to the present, where she defends journalists from lawsuits and unseals court documents and government records. In addition to teaching at UCI, she taught media law and First Amendment law at the University of Southern California, and in 2017 was a First Amendment columnist for TheWrap.

From 2007 until 2016, Prof. Seager served as a vice president in the litigation department of Fox Entertainment Group, where she worked for National Geographic Channel, Fox Television Stations, FX, and Fox Sports. Before attending law school, she worked as a journalist for the LA Weekly, LA Daily Journal, Los Angeles Herald Examiner, and United Press International. She was awarded the Freedom of Information Award in 2004 by the Los Angeles Chapter of the Society for Professional Journalists.

For more information about the grant and the Legal Clinic Fund, please click here.

About the Legal Clinic Fund

The Legal Clinic Fund is a collaborative fund to support the growth and sustainability of legal clinics across the United States that seek to advance and defend First Amendment rights, media freedom, and transparency in their communities and nationally. It is generously supported by Democracy Fund, Heising-Simons Foundation, and The Klarman Family Foundation. The Miami Foundation serves as fiscal sponsor for the Fund.

About the UCI Law Intellectual Property, Arts, and Technology Clinic

In the UCI Intellectual Property, Arts, and Technology Clinic, students work to support innovation and expression in the digital age by advising and representing clients on a range of matters dealing with copyright, patent, privacy and media law, among other areas. Clients include artists, entrepreneurs, filmmakers, journalists, nonprofits, policymakers, and scientists. Through this work, Clinic students gain important legal skills while examining the role of the public interest in intellectual property and technology law. For more information about the IPAT Clinic, visit https://sites.uci.edu/ipat.

About the University of California, Irvine School of Law

The University of California, Irvine School of Law is a visionary law school and provides an innovative and comprehensive curriculum, prioritizes public service, and demonstrates a commitment to diversity within the legal profession. UCI Law students have completed more than 90,000 hours of pro bono work in the past decade. Forty-five percent of UCI Law’s graduates are students of color. The collaborative and interdisciplinary community at UCI Law includes extraordinary students, world-renowned faculty, engaged alumni, and enthusiastic supporters. More information on UCI Law is available here. Please follow us on Twitter and Instagram @ucilaw and SnapChat: ucilaw.

Media Contact:

Mojgan Sherkat
949-824-7937
msherkat@law.uci.edu

 

Reposted from UCI Law News.

IPAT Clinic wins disclosure of DCFS records in Avalos case

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Students from the UCI Intellectual Property, Arts, and Technology Clinic won disclosure of government records earlier this year, revealing how social workers failed to protect a 10-year-old Los Angeles boy from years of alleged physical abuse, eventually ending with his death and murder charges being filed against his mother and her boyfriend.

The clinic’s client, journalist Garrett Therolf, published a lengthy story about the boy, Anthony Avalos, in the Los Angeles Times on September 4 based in part on the documents obtained by UCI students.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-09-03/anthony-avalos-death-gabriel-fernandez-dcfs-workers

Students Cassie Doutt, Shanxi Feng, and Emily Asgari filed a petition with the Los Angeles Superior Court’s juvenile court division in March 2019 on behalf of Therolf, a staff writer at the UC Berkeley Investigative Reporting Program, asking the court to unseal records from the LA Department of Children and Family Services detailing years of alleged abuse of young Anthony.  In July, a judge ordered most of the records unsealed, and Garrett was provided the documents in late August.

The students are part of the IPAT Clinic’s Press Freedom and Transparency practice, headed by UCI Staff Attorney Susan E. Seager, providing pro bono legal services to journalists, documentary filmmakers, and others.

 

IPAT Clinic joins Free Expression Legal Network

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The IPAT Clinic is a founding member of the Free Expression Legal Network, a new nationwide network of law clinics and scholars who provide pro bono legal support for public interest journalism. Today the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press formally announced the network, which will help clinics collaborate, refer matters, and share resources.  The IPAT Clinic has been working for several years with the RCFP, clinicians, and media lawyers on the development of this network, which has informed our own Press Freedom and Transparency practice. We are delighted to be part of a dazzling cohort of passionate and skillful attorneys, students, and activists.

Read more about our work with journalists here.

More information about the Free Expression Legal Network is available at http://freeexpression.law/.

 

 

 

 

Planning for Election 2020

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This week, Hannah Green and Prachi Mistry, who are Certified Law Students in the IPAT Clinic, attended a public hearing hosted by the Orange County Registrar of Voters, where Registrar Neal Kelley discussed the Draft Election Administration Plan (EAP) and received public feedback. Orange County has opted in to the California Voter’s Choice Act of 2016, meaning that Orange County will be replacing traditional polling centers with vote centers and adding many ballot dropboxes for vote-by-mail ballots. These changes are meant to increase the accessibility and security of the voting process in Orange County elections. The Public Hearing and EAP can be accessed here. Additionally, the public comment period is still open regarding the EAP (which can also be submitted here). Comments will be considered in the changes that are made for the final draft of the EAP.

The presentation highlighted extensive planning and outreach efforts to transition from traditional polling centers to vote centers. Specifically, 38 vote centers open for 11 days and 188 vote centers open for 4 days. These vote centers will allow voters to cast their ballot at any center up to ten days prior to election day, including two weekends before election day. Additionally, vote centers will include electronic check-ins and an increased number of accessible voting booths (which will include language and disability accommodations). Most importantly, all 1.6 million registered Orange County voters will receive a vote-by-mail (VBM) ballot. Ballot dropboxes will be placed in high-traffic areas, from shopping centers to community centers, to improve accessibility. The system integrates high-speed mail sorting technology that documents every returned envelope and tracks each ballot. Voters can therefore track the status of their ballots and ensure that their vote is, in fact, recorded. According to Mr. Kelley, these innovations are based on current voter behavior and the projected trends, and the resulting model facilitates both vote-by-mail and in-person voting.

Orange County has often been at the forefront of election practices, previously conducting pilots of risk-limiting audits in order to improve the accuracy and efficiency of its auditing procedures. Traditionally, audits have been conducted via a One Percent Manual Tally (“1PMT”) (also known as the Post-Election Manual Tally), which applies a blanket approach of hand-counting the ballots in one percent of each county’s precincts. In contrast, risk-limiting audits calculate the number of ballots that need to be hand-counted so as to detect with a precise degree of statistical certainty a potential error in the reported outcome.

Most elections experts agree that risk-limiting audits are more likely to identify an error in the reported outcome than the 1PMT, and often they require less hand-counting than the 1PMT. But they also are administered differently and it is more difficult to understand how they work. In light of these complexities, the IPAT Clinic are working with the California Voter Foundation to look into the pros and cons of risk-limiting audits as compared to the 1PMT from a voter’s perspective, and how to make the process more administrable and comprehensible.

To read more about the pilot risk-limiting audits previously conducted by the Orange County registrar, go here and here.