The Midwest, and Minnesota in particular, are traditionally seen as repositories of America’s most cherished values. A significant number of First Amendment cases in the state have shaped the boundaries and protections of free expression. In Near v. Minnesota (1931), for example, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a rogue newspaper that accused local officials of being implicated with gangsters; the case was later cited as a precedent for upholding publication of the Pentagon Papers. A more recent ruling, Minnesota Voters Alliance v. Mansky (2018), maintained that a state law prohibiting individuals from wearing political apparel around polling places was unconstitutional. How have these and other cases contributed to the evolving understanding of Free Speech rights? Is there a dark side to this history?

Featured: Suki Dardarian, editor and senior vice president of the Star Tribune, oversees all newsroom operations. She joined the newspaper in 2014, and prior to that, was managing editor and director of audience development at the Seattle Times, where she was a senior editor for 14 years. Dardarian helped oversee work that earned two Pulitzer Prizes, for breaking news and investigative reporting. She earlier served as a senior editor and reporter at the News Tribune in Tacoma, Washington.

Leita Walker, a litigator in the Minneapolis office of Ballard Spahr, has nearly 15 years of experience defending media organizations in libel cases and helping them obtain access to governmental and judicial records. Her First Amendment practice includes defending libel, privacy, and right of publicity claims; prepublication vetting of both news and entertainment content; and advising clients on subpoenas and privilege issues, copyright law, and state and federal Freedom of Information Act laws.

T. Anansi Wilson, an associate professor at Mitchell Hamline Law School, is founding director of the Center for the Study of Black Life and the Law, articulating interventions into the ways the law orders and disorders Black and BlaQueer living and dying in the United States. Wilson’s work analyzes the ever-changing relationship among race, law, sexuality, power, and citizenship. They were recently awarded the MN Lavender Bar Association’s Equity & Justice Award. Wilson earned a JD from Howard University Law School and a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin.

Sid Bedingfield (moderator), a journalism historian, is a professor and Cowles Research Fellow in Journalism, Democracy, and Race at the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of Newspaper Wars: Civil Rights and White Resistance in South Carolina, 1935-1965, and co-editor of Journalism and Jim Crow: White Supremacy and the Black Struggle for a New America. He spent more than two decades as a journalist at newspapers, a wire service, and CNN. Recorded Sept. 18, 2023