UCI Law School Adjunct Professor Susan E. Seager will receive the Guardian Award for Contributions to Press Freedom on June 25 at the Los Angeles Press Club’s 64th Annual Journalism Awards Dinner in Los Angeles.
The LA Press Club is giving Professor Seager the award for her work leading the Press Freedom and Transparency Project, a law clinic program that provides free legal services for independent journalists, documentary filmmakers, news photographers, and press advocacy groups. It is the only law clinic practice of its kind on the West Coast.
“I feel honored to provide legal help to all the brave independent journalists California who work without the safety net of big media,” Seager said. “Independent journalists play a vital role in protecting our democracy by fearlessly reporting about police brutality and the newest waves of fascists, white supremacists, religious nationalists.”
The Press Freedom and Transparency Project, which opened in 2018 as part of the law school’s Intellectual Property, Arts, and Technology Clinic, pairs law students with independent journalists to provide various types of legal services.
Professor Seager worked for more than a decade as a journalist in Southern California before starting law school at age 40 as a mother of two small children. She earned her law degree at Yale Law School and returned to Los Angeles to work as a media defense attorney at the law firm of Davis Wright Tremaine and later as an in-house lawyer at Fox Entertainment Group in Century City. She is married to Alan Mittelstaedt, an associate professor at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.
The law school received a $450,000, three-year grant from the Legal Clinic Fund in the fall of 2019 to expand the Press Freedom clinic work.
In just four years, Press Freedom Project law students have:
- Filed two civil rights lawsuits against the County of Los Angeles and City of Los Angeles on behalf of Long Beach photojournalist Pablo Unzueta and Knock LA journalists Jonathan Peltz and Kate Gallagher, who were wrongfully arrested while covering public protests in Los Angeles in 2020 and 2021. The lawsuits are pending.
- Filed a successful California Public Records Act lawsuit against the City of Ana for release of police documents and a 911 recording on behalf of independent Los Angeles journalist Ben Camacho, who used the documents to write an article in 2022 about Santa Ana Police Department officers who share gang-like skull tattoos who allegedly sexually harassed a 15-year-old girl at a restaurant.
- Submitted successful California Public Records Act requests for police documents on behalf of independent Los Angeles news website Knock LA and reporter Cerise Castle, who used the documents to write an investigative article in 2022 about a suspicious fatal shooting by a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy.
- Filed several successful motions to unseal hundreds of pages of juvenile court records on behalf of independent journalist Garrett Therolf at the UC Berkeley School of Graduate Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Project, who used the records for his 2020 co-produced Netflix television documentary series, “The Trials of Gabriel Fernandez,” to report about the failure of the Los Angeles county child welfare system to protect children from fatal abuse.
- Filed a successful California Public Records Act lawsuit against the County of Los Angeles to win disclosure of nearly 10 years of records of settlements of misconduct lawsuits against Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department and District Attorney’s Office on behalf of Prison Legal News.
- Submitted successful California Public Records Act requests for internal investigative records from Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office and South Pasadena Police Department documenting the fatal police shooting of Stand and Deliver and ER actress Vanessa Marquez during her mental health crisis in her apartment, including extensive body cam footage, on behalf of Los Angeles documentary filmmaker Cyndy Fujikawa, who is finalizing a documentary film about the shooting.
- Submitted successful California Public Records Act requests for government records revealing police misconduct spanning several decades from numerous law enforcement agencies throughout California on behalf of independent journalist Katey Rusch at UC Berkeley School of Graduate Journalism Investigative Reporting Program, who is finalizing a news report about the documents.
- Won dismissal of criminal court gag order against independent Latino journalist T.J. Esposito in Bakersfield, California in 2019.
- Advised the Los Angeles Press Club and other journalist groups in their successful push for passage of California SB 98, which allows journalists to remain in place while covering protests and other public events after police declare an unlawful assembly and order protesters to disperse.