Jane E. Kirtley

Jane E. Kirtley is the Silha Professor of Media Ethics and Law at the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota. She is also Director of The Silha Center for the Study of Media Ethics and Law and an affiliated faculty member at the University of Minnesota Law School.

Kirtley speaks frequently on media law and ethics issues in the United States and abroad. She has been principal speaker for the “Privacy and Data Protection” panel at the Practising Law Institute’s annual Communications Law in the Digital Age conference for more than 10 years. 

Kirtley has also lectured before meetings of the Media Law Resource Center, National Foundation for Judicial Excellence, the Canadian Media Lawyers Association (Ad IDEM), UNESCO (Paris) and many state bar associations, as well as countless journalism groups such as the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) and the Associated Collegiate Press. She has been the recipient of multiple Speaker and Specialist grants from the U.S. Department of State, most recently to Brazil in Spring 2019.

Kirtley has written friend of the court briefs in media law and Freedom of Information Act cases, as well as articles and chapters on media law and media ethics for scholarly journals and the popular and professional press. In 2010, her Media Law handbook was published by the U.S. Department of State and was translated into nine languages. She also co-authored a textbook, Media Ethics Today.

Kirtley was a Fulbright Scholar teaching U.S. media law and media ethics at the University of Latvia’s Law Faculty in Riga during Spring 2016. In 2004, she was a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at Suffolk University Law School in Boston, Massachusetts, and in 2012, an Adjunct Professor of Law in the London Law Programme for the University of Notre Dame Law School.

Kirtley was Executive Director of The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press for 14 years. Prior to that, she was an attorney with the law firm Nixon, Hargrave, Devans and Doyle in Rochester, N.Y. and Washington, D.C. She is a member of the New York, District of Columbia, and Virginia bars, as well as several federal district and appeals courts and the Supreme Court of the United States. Prof. Kirtley also worked as a reporter for the Evansville (Indiana) Press and The Oak Ridger and Nashville Banner (Tennessee).

She has served on the boards of the Society of Professional Journalists Foundation, the Minnesota Coalition on Government Information, Communication Law and Policy and the Journal of Media Law and Ethics. Prof. Kirtley’s honors include the National Scholastic Press Association’s Pioneer Award, the SPJ-Minnesota Pro Chapter’s Peter S. Popovich Award for Freedom of Information; the Edith Wortman First Amendment Matrix Foundation Award; the Medill School of Journalism’s Hall of Achievement; the FOI Hall of Fame; and the John Peter Zenger Award for Freedom of the Press and the People’s Right to Know from the University of Arizona. She was a Pulitzer Prize juror in 2015, and was a member of the American Bar Association’s Standing Committee on the Silver Gavel Awards from 2018-2020, and is currently a facilitator for the screening committee.

Kirtley received her J.D. degree from Vanderbilt University Law School in 1979, where she was Executive Articles Editor of the Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law. She holds bachelor and master of journalism degrees from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism (1975, 1976).

(Updated April 2025)