Morgan N. Weiland is the Executive Director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School, where she received her JD in 2015. She proposed, helped design, and is in the process of completing the first joint degree program between SLS and Stanford’s Communication Department, where she is a PhD candidate.

Her dissertation, Making Internet Law: How Cyberspace Was Socially Constructed as a First Amendment Speech System, explains how we ended up with a system in which private, for-profit social media firms have power over—but not responsibility for—public speech. She tells the ironic story of how a multi-decade social effort to defend liberal democracy starting during the Cold War at MIT transformed through the work of the non-profit group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) into a libertarian effort to define the internet as akin to the western frontier and the founding-era printing press. Borrowing methods from science and technology studies, her dissertation shows how the EFF joined the legal challenge to the Communications Decency Act and ultimately shaped how the Supreme Court conceptualized the internet as a speech system in Reno v. ACLU, 521 U.S. 844 (1997).

Weiland was a Lecturer in Law at SLS during the 2017-18 academic year, when she developed and taught a new course about platforms, law, and ethics with Professor Barbara van Schewick. She is also an Affiliate Scholar at SLS’s Center for Internet & Society. She clerked for the Honorable M. Margaret McKeown on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals during the 2018-19 term. She is admitted to the California Bar.

Please visit her website for her CV and publications. Follow her on Twitter @morganweiland.