Mary-Rose Papandrea

Professor Papandrea is a First Amendment, free speech, and media law expert. She has written extensively about government secrecy and the press, the reporter's privilege, defamation and privacy law, public employee speech rights, the government speech doctrine, speech issues in public schools, and free speech and academic freedom issues in higher education. Her work has appeared in Stanford Law Review, Supreme Court Review, Michigan Law Review, Northwestern Law Review, and Minnesota Law Review, among others. She is the co-author of the casebook Media and the Law (with Lee Levine and David Ardia) and has recently joined the casebook First Amendment Law: Freedom of Expression and Freedom of Religion (with Arthur Hellman, William Araiza, Thomas Baker, and Ashutosh Bhagwhat).

Professor Papandrea received her BA in Humanities from Yale College, where she was an editor of The Yale Daily News, and she received her JD from the University of Chicago Law School, where she served as the Topics & Comments Editor of the University of Chicago Law Review. After law school, Professor Papandrea clerked for Associate Justice David H. Souter of the United States Supreme Court as well as Judge Douglas Ginsburg of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and Judge John G. Koeltl of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. She practiced law at Williams & Connolly LLP and taught at Boston College Law School and the University of North Carolina School of Law prior to joining GW Law. She has also been a visiting professor at Fordham, the University of Connecticut, Wake Forest, and and the University of Paris X (Nanterre).

While at the University of North Carolina, Professor Papandrea served as the law school's associate dean for academic affairs, led the university’s strategic initiative “Promote Democracy,” and received the Charles E. Daye Award for Excellence in Service and the Professor S. Elizabeth Gibson Award for Faculty Excellence.