Morgan Weiland

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 dissertation, Making Internet Law: How Cyberspace Was Socially Constructed as a First Amendment Speech System, traces the social and cultural processes by which the internet was transformed into a speech system protected by the First Amendment. The project, which she is preparing to develop into a book, 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, and argues for a critical approach to understanding and shaping the legal regulation of emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence.

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 also written about internet policy, focused on network neutrality.

During the 2017-18 academic year, she was a Lecturer in Law at Stanford Law School. She clerked on the Ninth Circuit for the Honorable M. Margaret McKeown during the 2018-19 term and served as the Executive Director of the Stanford Constitutional Law Center from 2021 to 2025. She is admitted to the California Bar.