Susan E. Seager is a veteran First Amendment lawyer and adjunct clinical professor of law at UC Irvine Law School. She and her clinic students provide free legal work for independent journalists and non-profit news organizations at the law school’s Press Freedom clinic.
Professor Seager loves fighting libel bullies, suing cops to get their misconduct records, and winning court battles to get court records unsealed
Her UC Irvine law clinic has helped Knock LA reporter Cerise Castle and the prison newspaper Prison Legal News win disclosure of records about deputy shootings and legal settlements from obstructionist Los Angeles County. Professor Seager and her students filed a civil rights lawsuit against the LA Sheriff’s Department for its unlawful arrest of Cal State Long Beach student photographer Pablo Unzueta. Professor Seager and her students have won disclosure of juvenile court records for journalist Garrett Therolf, which he used in his co-produced Netflix documentary series, “The Trials of Gabriel Fernandez.”
Susan is a journalist and author of the 2016 article “Donald J. Trump Is a Libel Bully But Also a Libel Loser” detailing Trump’s history of suing the press and critics before his election as president. She has taught media law and First Amendment law at the University of Southern California.
From 2007 until 2016, she worked as a vice president in the litigation department of Fox Entertainment Group, where she worked for National Geographic Channel, Fox Television Stations, FX, and Fox Sports. She never worked for Fox News and never would.
Before attending law school, she worked as a journalist for the LA Weekly, LA Daily Journal, Los Angeles Herald Examiner, and United Press International. She was awarded the Freedom of Information Award in 2004 by the Los Angeles Chapter of the Society for Professional Journalists.
She earned her law degree from Yale Law School in 1999 as the mother of two children and wife of a supportive husband, USC Annenberg Associate Professor Alan Mittelstaedt.
