Guest post by IPAT Clinic Certified Law Student Drew Navarre
When I joined the IPAT Clinic’s Press Freedom Project in November of 2023, my expectations were a mixed bag. I was unsure of the type of projects I was going to be placed on. Was I going to be doing a lot of research? Was I going to have to write to the court? What were my clients going to be like? The only thing I was sure of was that my work had the goal of protecting press freedom; the only problem with that was I was unsure of what that meant.
When I joined my clinic team, I was initially excited and soon overwhelmed. My clients, Jon Peltz and Kate Gallagher, are suing a police department for wrongful arrest while they were covering a protest of an unhoused encampment cleanup at Echo Park Lake. At the time I joined, our team had just received a massive discovery dump. Part of our work involved going through the documents, audio recordings, and footage in order to understand what had happened, refine our theory of the case, and prepare ourselves for upcoming hearings and depositions. The discovery was large—to put it lightly. We were faced with over 60,000 pages of documents and hours of body cam footage and police radar. It took us dozens of hours to go through it all. I felt a little bit overwhelmed. At the same time, I was thrilled that I had real work to do. For the first time, I had a client, and it was my job to advocate for them. I have set my goal of becoming a litigator since I was fourteen. At that moment, something that was once a dream had become a reality.
One of the most rewarding parts of working on this project has been learning about the importance of press freedom. Obviously, I was aware that the freedom of the press is a fundamental liberty in any functioning democracy but had never really explored the concept until I was assigned to this clinic.
Our clients were arrested while covering a protest. Being arrested while carrying out one of the most basic of journalistic tasks violated their fundamental rights. A journalist’s function is to disseminate information to the public. By arresting journalists, powerful forces like governments can control information in a way that benefits them and their agenda. The freedom of the press is our protection against this. By representing our clients, we are fighting the government’s control of information. The public has a right to know what the government is doing, so long as we live in a democracy. By serving my clients in this clinic, I have had a small role in ensuring that not only my clients’ liberties are protected, but other journalists will be protected from similar violations in the future, and the public’s right to information will similarly be protected.
All in all, I am grateful for UCI Law’s clinical requirement and commitment to experiential learning. I feel that it has contributed to my legal education by giving me hands-on, real-world experience for clients that may not otherwise have representation. Further, I have been able to pursue my own values of liberty to work towards a goal of protecting freedom of speech and the press. My advice to future clinical students is to find projects that you are passionate about that will also give you practical training to continue that work in your future career—something I am certain the IPAT Clinic’s Press Freedom Project has done for me.