Michael Menna joins the Constitutional Law Center after a year-long clerkship for the Honorable M. Margaret McKeown of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. His research and teaching investigate how property, liability, and competition rules shape media economies—past, present, and future. While copyright often takes center stage in legal debates about creativity and innovation, his scholarship illuminates how contract, antitrust, and statutory safe harbors like Section 230 also structure how information and entertainment are produced, distributed, and preserved. After graduating from Stanford Law School in 2022, he held fellowships at the public-interest technology organizations Creative Commons and Internet Archive. There, he co-authored the widely circulated statement on “digital library rights,” now endorsed by a growing list of memory institutions from across the globe under the auspices of the “Our Future Memory” collaboration.

Michael’s academic writing is either published or forthcoming in The Journal of Intellectual Property Law, English Literary History, PMLA, Shakespeare Studies, Early Theatre, and Post45. His published legal scholarship has examined supply-side failures in copyright’s ability to support and protect creators from financial exploitation. Now, though, he is pursuing a second project focused on copyright’s demand-side failures to allow cultural preservation, asking how law can guarantee long-term public access to knowledge in an era of digital distribution, platform control, and generative AI.

Michael also holds a Ph.D. in English from Stanford. He is in the process of completing his first book project, Policies in Making: The Regulation of Shakespearean Entertainment, which uncovers how Elizabethan theater companies negotiated and shaped the regulation of their own novel industry. By revisiting a time before copyright was even a word, this project offers historical perspective on the many laws and institutions that continue to shape creative expression and public discourse today.