Prof. Christina Koningisor Wins National Award for Press Freedom Scholarship 

Headshot of Professor Christina Koningisor

Professor Christina Koningisor has earned national recognition for her research on how legal protections for the press are evolving in response to shifts in executive power and media capacity. 

Faculty Who Lead: Christina Koningisor

  • Honored with the 2025 Harry Stonecipher Award for Outstanding Research from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication
  • Co-authored the Virigina Law Review-published article “First Amendment Disequilibrium,” exploring the shifting legal landscape for press rights and executive branch power
  • Is a former New York Times lawyer and Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals clerk

The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication has presented Professor Christina Koningisor and her co-author with the 2025 Harry Stonecipher Award for Outstanding Research.  

The award, which honors exceptional research on media law, recognized Koningisor and Lyrissa Lidsky, a professor at the University of Florida Levin College of Law, for their article, “First Amendment Disequilibrium,” published in the Virginia Law Review. It analyzes how legal assumptions about the news media’s power and the executive branch’s constraints have changed over time. The authors argue that traditional First Amendment protections are grounded in a model that may no longer reflect current conditions—particularly given the decline of local journalism and changes in government transparency practices. They propose updating the legal framework to reflect the evolving dynamics between the press and public institutions. 

“These questions around press power vis-a-vis the government have become increasingly critical in recent months and years,” Koningisor said. “The press has long acted as a crucial check on executive government power. And the decline of the press has important implications for the health of our democratic system.”  

Koningisor teaches and writes about constitutional law, administrative law, media law, and state and local government. Her writing has appeared in leading journals including the Columbia Law Review, Yale Law Journal, and University of Pennsylvania Law Review.  

She holds degrees from Brown University and Yale Law School and previously worked as legal counsel at The New York Times, clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and served as a Fulbright fellow in Kuwait.