FIRST AMENDMENT DEFENDER From the newsroom to the courtroom, Susan Seager brings her work experience to the classroom
From the newsroom and the courtroom, Susan Seager brings her work experience to the classroom By Christina Schweighofer
Susan Seager has studied photography and managed a band. She’s had one career as a newspaper reporter, another as an attorney defending media organizations and artists, and she’s now working as a lecturer at the USC Gould School of Law and as the First Amendment columnist for The Wrap, a digital entertainment news organization. The common
denominator? Seager would never settle for boring. Take Seager’s first position as a lawyer, starting in 1999: Working as an associate at the Los Angeles offices of Davis Wright Tremaine LLP, which specializes in media law, she got to work with clients like the Los Angeles Times, CNN and TMZ. She filed motions to unseal documents or open a courtroom to the public, and she worked with a team of lawyers on a 13-week libel case. Her next job, as an in-house counsel with Fox Entertainment Group from 2007 to 2016, felt equally exciting. Seager defended reporters, screenwriters and photographers from lawsuits against them. “While my friends were working 14 hours a day on a contract, I was working on super interesting things that I really believed in,” she says. “You’re talking about the Constitution, the First Amendment — weighty subjects.”
Seager, who teaches Copyright, Trademark and Related Rights for the LLM program at USC Gould and media law at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, graduated from Stanford University with a bachelor’s degree in photography, but spent the first few years out of school jobbing as a waitress and for newspapers and traveling to places like Mexico and Guatemala. “There was a very bad civil war in Guatemala,” she says, “but sticking to the gringo trail was safe.” In 1982, Seager began working as a full-time reporter for media outlets including the San Luis Obispo Telegram-Tribune and the news agency UPI. “I love writing and interviewing people,” she says. Her first stint as a writer ended in the mid-1990s, when she, her husband and their two young children moved from L.A. to Portland, Maine, and she decided to go back to school. Seager earned a JD from Yale Law School, and in 1999 the family moved back to L.A., where she began her second career, in media law. Seager, who will never be done finding the next challenge, advises her students accordingly: “It is much more fun being a lawyer if the things you’re doing are interesting to you. The first way to burn out is to do stuff that’s boring — even if it pays a lot.”
Fall | Winter 2017
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