About

David S. Ardia is the Reef C. Ivey II Excellence Fund Term Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina School of Law and serves as the faculty co-director of the UNC Center for Media Law and Policy. He also holds a secondary appointment at the UNC School of Media and Journalism. His teaching and research interests include constitutional law, media law, internet law, and torts. Ardia has authored the book 'Media and the Law' and has published numerous articles and essays on topics such as the First Amendment, privacy, government transparency, and Internet law. His work has been featured in various law reviews including the Illinois Law Review, William & Mary Law Review, BYU Law Review, and Berkeley Technology Law Journal.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Law and economics
• Public relations
• Law
• Business
• Advertising
• Internet privacy
• Economics

Selected publications

• Popular Sovereignty and a Right to Know About the Government 

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Sealed Justice: Federal Courts’ Inconsistent Record-Sealing Rules and Their Impact on Judicial Transparency

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Popular Sovereignty and a Right to Know About the Government

  eYLS (Yale Law School) · 2025-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This Article argues that the U.S. Constitution implicitly contains a structural “right to know” about the government, rooted in the doctrine of popular sovereignty rather than the First Amendment. Democratic self‑government requires public access to governmental information; without it, the people cannot exercise informed consent or their sovereign authority. The Article critiques reliance on purely statutory transparency regimes such as FOIA, noting their fragility and susceptibility to political rollback. Through historical and structural analysis, it shows that the Framers viewed an informed citizenry as essential to maintaining checks and balances. The Article proposes three principles for operationalizing a constitutional right to know: limiting the right to information necessary for democratic governance, balancing it against countervailing state interests, and affording the government flexibility in designing access procedures. Recognizing such a right, it argues, would strengthen democratic resilience amid rising opacity and polarization.

  Publisher

• State Regulation of Election-Related Speech in the U.S.: An Overview and Comparative Analysis

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2021

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Computer Science
  PublisherDOI

• Addressing the Decline of Local News, Rise of Platforms, and Spread of Mis- and Disinformation Online: A Summary of Current Research and Policy Proposals

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2020 · 28 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Public relations
  PublisherDOI

• Privacy and Court Records: Online Access and the Loss of Practical Obscurity

  Faculty publications · 2017-08-04 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Court records present a conundrum for privacy advocates. Public access to the courts has long been a fundamental tenant of American democracy, helping to ensure that our system of justice functions fairly and that citizens can observe the actions of their government. Yet court records contain an astonishing amount of private and sensitive information, ranging from social security numbers to the names of sexual assault victims. Until recently, the privacy harms that attended the public disclosure of court records were generally regarded as insignificant because court files were difficult to search and access. But this “practical obscurity” is rapidly disappearing as the courts move from the paper-based world of the twentieth century to an interconnected, electronic world where physical and temporal barriers to information are eroding. These changes are prompting courts—and increasingly, legislatures—to reconsider public access to court records. Although this reexamination can be beneficial, a number of courts are abandoning the careful balancing of interests that has traditionally guided judges in access disputes and instead are excluding whole categories of information, documents, and cases from public access. This approach, while superficially appealing, is contrary to established First Amendment principles that require case-specific analysis before access can be restricted and is putting at risk the public’s ability to observe the functioning of the courts and justice system. This article pushes back against the categorical exclusion of information in court records. In doing so, it makes three core claims. First, the First Amendment provides a qualified right of public access to all court records that are material to a court’s exercise of its adjudicatory power. Second, before a court can restrict public access, it must engage in a case-specific evaluation of the privacy and public access interests at stake. Third, per se categorical restrictions on public access are not permissible. These conclusions do not leave the courts powerless to protect privacy, as some scholars assert. We must discard the notion that the protection of privacy is exclusively the job of judges and court staff. Instead, we need to shift the responsibility for protecting privacy to lawyers and litigants, who should not be permitted to include highly sensitive information in court files if it is not relevant to the case. Of course, we cannot eliminate all private and sensitive information from court records, but as long as courts continue to provide physical access to their records, the First Amendment does not preclude court administrators from managing electronic access in order to retain some of the beneficial aspects of practical obscurity. By minimizing the inclusion of unnecessary personal information in court files and by limiting the extent of electronic access to certain types of highly sensitive information, we can protect privacy while at the same time ensuring transparency and public accountability.

  Publisher

• Court Transparency and the First Amendment

  Faculty publications · 2017-01-01 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This is a critical time for court transparency because the courts, like so many institutions of government, are in the midst of a transformation from the largely paper-based world of the twentieth century to an interconnected, electronic world where physical and temporal barriers to information are disappearing. Not surprisingly, the shift to electronic access to the courts raises significant privacy concerns. As a result of these and other concerns, a number of courts and legislatures are considering sharply limiting public access to certain court proceedings and records.

  PublisherOA PDF

• Privacy and Court Records: An Empirical Study

  Berkeley technology law journal · 2016-01-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  As courts, libraries, and archives move to make court records available online, the increased ease of public access raises concerns about privacy. Little work has been done, however, to study how often sensitive information appears in court records and the context in which it appears. This Article fills this gap by analyzing a large corpus of briefs and appendices submitted to the North Carolina Supreme Court from 1984 to 2000. Based on a survey of privacy laws and privacy scholarship, we created a taxonomy of 140 types of sensitive information, grouped into thirteen categories. We then coded a stratified random sample of 504 court filings in order to determine the frequency of appearance of each sensitive information type and to identify relationships, patterns, and correlations between information types and various case and document characteristics.\nWe present several important findings. First, although a wide variety of sensitive information appears in the court records we sampled, it is not uniformly distributed throughout the records. Most of the documents contained relatively few incidences of sensitive information while a handful of documents contained a large number of pieces of sensitive information. Second, court records vary substantially in the types and frequency of sensitive information they contain. Sensitive information in seven of the categories— “Location,” “Identity,” “Criminal Proceedings,” “Health,” “Assets,” “Financial Information,” and “Civil Proceedings”—appeared much more frequently than the other categories in our taxonomy. Third, information associated with criminal proceedings, such as witness and crime victim names, is pervasive in court records, appearing in all types of cases and records. Fourth, criminal cases have disproportionately more sensitive information than civil or juvenile cases, with death penalty cases far exceeding all other case types. Fifth, appendices are generally not quantitatively different from legal briefs in terms of the frequency and types of sensitive information they contain, a finding that goes against the intuition of many privacy advocates. Sixth, there were no overarching trends in the frequency of sensitive information during the seventeen-year period we studied.\nAlthough we found a substantial amount of sensitive information in the court records we studied, we do not take a position regarding what information, if any, courts or archivists should redact or what documents should be withheld from online access or otherwise managed for privacy protection. These largely normative questions must be answered based on a careful balancing of the competing public access and privacy interests. Nevertheless, we expect that this highly granular view of the occurrence of sensitive information in these North Carolina Supreme Court records will help policymakers and judges evaluate the potential harms to privacy interests that might arise from online access to court records. We also hope that scholars will draw on our taxonomy and empirical data to develop and ground normative arguments about the proper approach for balancing government transparency and personal privacy.

  PublisherDOI

• Freedom of Speech, Defamation, and Injunctions

  Faculty publications · 2013-08-08 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  It has long been a fixture of Anglo-American law that defamation plaintiffs are not entitled to injunctive relief; their remedies are solely monetary. Indeed, it has been repeated as a truism: “equity will not enjoin a libel.” This precept rests on one of the strongest presumptions in First Amendment jurisprudence: that injunctions against libel and other kinds of speech are unconstitutional prior restraints. But it may not be true, at least not anymore. Over the past decade, the Internet has brought increased attention to the adequacy of the remedies available in defamation cases. Prior to the widespread availability of digital publishing, most defamation lawsuits in the United States involved claims against the mass media. These defendants were amenable, at least in theory, to the threat of large damage awards and had professional and financial interests in maintaining their reputations for accurate reporting. Today, the defendants in defamation cases are more likely to be bloggers or users of social media, such as Facebook and Twitter. For this new crop of defendants, the threat of money damages does not appear to serve the same limiting function on their behavior. Although the Supreme Court has never held that an injunction is a permissible remedy for defamation, the past decade has seen a veritable surge in injunctions directed at defamatory speech, especially speech on the Internet. Despite this surge, courts have not clearly articulated why injunctions are permissible under the First Amendment and consistent with long-standing principles of equity. As a result, many judges—and scholars—remain confused about the availability and proper scope of injunctive relief in defamation cases. This Article challenges the widely held view that defamation law does not countenance injunctions. In doing so, it presents the first comprehensive analysis of more than two centuries of case law. Reviewing these cases, it draws out the rationales, both constitutional and equitable, for the no-injunction rule. The Article concludes that although courts should be cautious when granting injunctions, a limited form of injunctive relief would be constitutional and consistent with equitable principles if it were limited solely to false statements on matters of private concern that a court has found—after full adjudication—are defamatory. It then describes how such a remedy could be structured so that it would be both effective and compatible with the First Amendment.

  Publisher

• Reputation in a Networked World: Revisiting the Social Foundations of Defamation Law

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2010-01-01 · 18 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  It is time again to rethink defamation law. The law we know today saw its origin in feudal times, expanded to serve as a counterweight to the disruption occasioned by the printing press, and was constitutionalized in the low-participation age of broadcast and print mass media. The journalistic institutions that led the fight for constitutional reform are now in decline while online platforms optimized for high participation, such as blogs, social networks, and discussion forums, are in ascendency. In this age of the networked information economy, reputation occupies a very different role in the social order than it did even twenty years ago. Using a recent defamation lawsuit filed by the actor Ron Livingston against a user of Wikipedia as a lens through which to examine defamation law's operation in our increasingly networked society, this Article argues that defamation law suffers from significant doctrinal and practical limitations that preclude it from achieving its goal of protecting reputation. Cognizant of these limitations, it offers some guidelines for reforming defamation law, suggesting that existing monetary remedies should be deemphasized while alternative approaches that seek to correct inaccurate information and provide opportunities for contextualization should be pursued. The Article concludes that we should take as our touchstone that reputation is a societal interest and devise remedies that leverage the power of communities to deal with reputational harm. Although the global communication networks that are the hallmarks of our networked society have brought new reputational challenges, they also provide novel solutions to prevent and ameliorate those harms. One solution is to enlist, through legal and social incentives, the help of online intermediaries such as content hosts and search providers. These intermediaries play a central role in community governance and are often in a position to recognize and respond to reputational harms. By harnessing the power of communities to deter and mitigate reputational harm, we will be better able to balance the protection of reputation with society’s desire to maintain an environment for speech that is conducive to public engagement and vigorous debate.

  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Anne Klinefelter

  2 shared

• Evan Ringel

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  2 shared

• Ashley Fox

  1 shared

• Victoria Smith Ekstrand

  1 shared

• Allysan Scatterday

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  1 shared