The Scope of First Amendment Protection for Public Protest: Permits, Police Encounters, Recording Rights, and Arrest Procedures in 2026

Vera Eidelman is a senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, where she works on the rights to free speech and privacy in the digital age. Her work focuses on the free speech rights of protesters and young people, online speech, and genetic privacy. She has litigated and argued constitutional and privacy cases in trial and appellate courts at the state and federal levels, including before the United States Supreme Court, with a practice centered on protecting expression and privacy interests against government and private intrusion. Before joining the ACLU, she built an early career spanning economic policy and law, including roles at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a federal clerkship.

Andrew Tutt co-chairs TL4J’s Nationwide Appellate & Supreme Court Practice. He is an accomplished Supreme Court and appellate advocate with a record of victories shaping civil rights enforcement, servicemember and veterans’ protections, appellate procedure, federal pleading standards, constitutional rights, and access to the courts. He has won major cases before the United States Supreme Court and has led appeals in every federal court of appeals, with appellate victories spanning the First Amendment, federal grant funding, prisoner and detainee rights, state sovereign immunity, administrative law, intellectual property, and complex federal statutes.

Virginia (“Ginny”) McCalmont is a partner at Forsgren Fisher McCalmont DeMarea Tysver LLP, where her practice focuses on complex litigation, appeals, and internal investigations. Her work on high-stakes civil rights matters has drawn national and international attention. She was recently part of a team that secured a preliminary injunction protecting Minnesota residents who were unfairly targeted by federal agents while observing and protesting Operation Metro Surge — an injunction later stayed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit and dissolved after Operation Metro Surge ended.

Seth Stern is the Chief of Advocacy at Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF), where he and the advocacy team collaborate with a broad range of partners — from independent bloggers and incarcerated journalists to major national news outlets and civil liberties organizations — to promote laws and policies that allow public-interest journalism to thrive. Before joining FPF, he practiced media and First Amendment law for 13 years at the Chicago firm Funkhouser Vegosen Liebman & Dunn (FVLD), where he remains Of Counsel. A former newspaper reporter and editor, he is a prolific writer and commentator on press freedom whose work has appeared in The Guardian, The Intercept, Rolling Stone, and Columbia Journalism Review, as well as local newspapers in his hometown of Chicago and around the country.