Kyu Youm

Professor Kyu Ho Youm has been the inaugural holder of the Jonathan Marshall First Amendment Chair in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon and a courtesy professor of law at the UO School of Law since 2002. Prior to Oregon, he taught at Arizona State University and the University of Miami. In January-February 2015, he was the visiting Wee Kim Wee professor in the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information at Nanyang Technological University.

Youm’s teaching and research focuses on U.S. communication law, digital freedom, and comparative media law. He has extensively published about freedom of speech and the press. Among his oft-noted law journal articles are “The Right of Reply and Freedom of the Press: An International and Comparative Law Perspective” in George Washington Law Review; “Freedom of Expression and the Law: Rights and Responsibilities in South Korea” in Stanford Journal of International Law; and “Cameras in the Courtroom in the Twenty-First Century: The U.S. Supreme Court Learning from Abroad?” in Brigham Young University Law Review.

His research on freedom of expression has been cited by American and foreign courts, including the U.K. Supreme Court, the High Court of Australia, and the Supreme Court of Canada.

Since 1996, Youm has contributed to several major media law texts and treatises, including Communication and the Law, Media Law and Ethics, International Libel & Privacy Handbook, and Media, Advertising & Entertainment Law Throughout the World. He has published Press Law in South Korea. He has edited nearly 50 communication law and media policy articles for the 12-volume International Encyclopedia of Communication. Currently, he is working on an international and foreign media law text for U.S. law schools.

Over the years, Youm has been actively invovled in various academic organizations. He is a former head of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication’s Law and Policy Division and a former chair of the Communication Law and Policy Group of the International Communication Association. In 2012-13, he was the president of the Association for Education in Journallism and Mass Communication, the premier academic organizaiton of 3,700-plus journalism scholars and practitioners. He is on the editorial boards of a dozen scholarly journals in the United States and abroad.

Youm has won a number of top paper awards at the academic conventions of AEJMC, ICA, and the National Communication Association. He has received fellowships from the American Press Institute, the AEJMC-Gannett Foundation, and the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. He has been selected for research grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Youm has been interviewed by U.S. and international news media on communication law issues. He often contributes opinion columns and book reviews to newspapers and trade magazines. Most recently, he wrote op-ed pieces on the “right to be forgotten” in EU law for the Straits Times in Singapore and for the Register-Guard in Eugene, Oregon. Besides, he delivers lectures on press freedom and media law and sits regularly on scholarly and professional panels in the United States and abroad

Youm received his bachelor’s degree in South Korea and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Southern Illinois University. He holds graduate degrees in law from Yale Law School and Oxford University.