Stephanie Krent is a staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute and a lecturer in law at Columbia Law School. Her work focuses on freedom of speech on social media and surveillance of marginalized groups, including the use of commercial spyware and the use of surveillance technologies in correctional facilities and at the border.

Krent successfully litigated PETA v. Tabak, a case that challenged federal health agencies’ practice of hiding social media comments that contained keywords associated with viewpoints critical of animal testing. She has authored numerous amicus briefs addressing the First Amendment implications of government censorship online.

Krent also leads several of the Institute’s projects at the intersection of privacy, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press. She leads the Knight Institute’s litigation in A.B.O. Comix v. County of San Mateo, which challenges a California county’s policy of digitizing and then destroying physical mail sent to people in its jails. She also led the Institute’s related litigation in Knight Institute v. Federal Bureau of Prisons, which sought records concerning the Bureau of Prisons’ digitization, retention, and surveillance of mail sent to people incarcerated in federal jails and prisons. She is a core member of the team seeking to hold NSO Group accountable for surveillance of members of the news organization El Faro in Dada v. NSO Group. She has also written several amicus briefs addressing warrantless searches of electronic devices at the border and leads the Institute’s related transparency litigation, Knight Institute v. DHS.

She has been quoted in The Washington Post, Reuters, The Hill, and The Intercept amongst other publications. Krent was previously a legal fellow for the Institute from the fall of 2019 until September 2020. Prior to joining the Institute, Krent clerked for Judge Edgardo Ramos of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York and Judge Julio M. Fuentes of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. She also worked as an associate at Jenner & Block.

Krent is a graduate of Barnard College and Yale Law School. During law school, she received the Harlan Fiske Stone Prize and the Potter Stewart Prize for her participation in moot court. She also served as a comments editor on the Yale Law Journal.