Katie Fallow

Katie Fallow

Katie Fallow is senior counsel at the Knight First Amendment Institute, where she focuses on threats to free speech and a free press in the digital age, particularly in the area of social media.

Fallow spearheads the Institute’s litigation concerning the government’s use of social media. She was one of the lead lawyers in the Institute’s ground-breaking case challenging President Trump’s blocking of people from his @realDonaldTrump Twitter account. Fallow also won the first federal appellate case holding that public officials who use social media accounts for official purposes have created a public forum and may not block people from those virtual forums based on viewpoint. Fallow is also litigating the Institute’s challenges to regulations requiring individuals to provide their social media handles to the government for collection and surveillance.

Fallow regularly appears in the media to discuss the Institute’s litigation docket and comment on government regulation of public forums and digital spaces.

Before joining the Knight Institute, Fallow was a litigation partner at Jenner & Block, LLP in Washington, D.C., where she represented video game makers in a long line of challenges to government restrictions on video games, culminating in the Supreme Court’s landmark case of EMA v. Brown, holding that violent video games are protected speech. She also defended The Huffington Post and other news outlets against defamation claims and filed numerous merits and amicus briefs in the Supreme Court on free speech issues, including sexually explicit speech, offensive speech, fighting words, and libel. After leaving Jenner & Block, Fallow was deputy director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection at the Federal Trade Commission.

She graduated from the University of California at Berkeley and Harvard Law School. After law school, she clerked for Judge Robert E. Keeton of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts and Judge Rosemary Barkett of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.