Biography
George Freeman is Executive Director of the Media Law Resource Center, a non-profit trade association supporting the media in legal matters. Before that he was Of Counsel to the law firm of Jenner & Block.
For 31 years he was the chief First Amendment lawyer in the Legal Department of The New York Times, leaving as Vice President and Assistant General Counsel in 2012. At the Times, he was primarily responsible for newsroom counseling of The Times, the company’s many other newspapers and its television stations and magazines; he also was responsible for the newspaper’s and company’s litigations, and was at the forefront of numerous high-profile First Amendment cases, including Judy Miller’s resistance to a subpoena in the prosecution of Scooter Libby and the successful defense of The Times in a libel case brought by quarterback Ken Stabler. The Times newspaper didn’t lose or settle a libel case for dollars during his tenure.
He was the William J. Brennan Visiting Professor at the Columbia Journalism School and also for decades taught at New York University and CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism. He has been Chair of the ABA’s and NYS Bar Association’s media law committees and was the co-founder and longtime Co-chair of the American Bar Association’s Forum on Communications Law annual (“Boca”) conference. He is a graduate of Amherst and the Harvard Law School, and is an avid tennis player.