Morgan N. Weiland is the Moorman-Simon Interdisciplinary Career Development Assistant Professor of Communication Law in the College of Communication at Boston University and holds a courtesy appointment at Boston University School of Law. She is an Affiliate Scholar at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet & Society and an Affiliated Fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project. Her research explores the intersection of new media technologies, communication history, and information policy through an interdisciplinary lens.

She is the first graduate of the joint degree program that she proposed and helped design between Stanford Law School, where she graduated with a JD in 2015, and Stanford’s Department of Communication, where she graduated with a PhD in June 2025.
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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 American 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 has numerous publications, including a 2022 article in the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities, “First Amendment Metaphors: The Death of the ‘Marketplace of Ideas’ and the Rise of the Post-Truth ‘Free Flow of Information’,” and a 2017 article in the Stanford Law Review, “Expanding the Periphery and Threatening the Core: The Ascendant Libertarian Speech Tradition.” Her Stanford Law Review article won the Harry W. Stonecipher Award for Distinguished Research in Media Law and Policy in 2018, awarded by AEJMC. She was the first graduate student to win this award. She has written about internet policy, focused on network neutrality.

During the 2017-18 academic year, Weiland was a Lecturer in Law at Stanford Law School. She developed and taught a new course about social media platforms, law, and society with Professor Barbara van Schewick.

She clerked for the Honorable M. Margaret McKeown on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals during the 2018-19 term. She served as the Executive Director of the Stanford Constitutional Law Center from 2021 to 2025. She is admitted to the California Bar.

Check out her website at https://www.mweiland.com/.