Kyle Langvardt

Professor Kyle Langvardt joined the faculty in July 2020. He is a First Amendment scholar who focuses on the Internet’s implications for free expression both as a matter of constitutional doctrine and as a practical reality. His written work addresses new and confounding policy issues including tech addiction, the collapse of traditional gatekeepers in online media and 3D-printable weapons. 

Professor Langvardt was awarded the Schmid Professorship for Excellence in Research for the 2024-25 academic year. Professor Langvardt’s most recent papers appear in venues including the Journal of Free Speech Law, the Yale Journal of Law and Technology, the Yale Law Journal Forum, Georgetown Law Journal, and the Fordham Law Review. Professor Langvardt is also a co-editor of Media and Society After Technological Disruption, a multiauthor volume published in 2024 by Cambridge University Press.

Professor Langvardt received his B.A. in Philosophy from Earlham College, where he graduated with College and Departmental Honors. He received his J.D. from the University of Chicago School of Law. After law school, Professor Langvardt practiced at the Chicago, Illinois office of Locke Lord Bissell & Liddell LLP (now Locke Lord LLP). He went on to teach as a lecturer in the Department of Business Law at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, and later as a professor at the University of Detroit Mercy School of Law, where he received James T. Barnes, Sr. Memorial Faculty Scholar Award in 2019.

Watch to see how Professor Langvardt is helping to regulate speech in the 21st Century. 

• Constitutional Law I 609/G
  This course is an introduction to American constitutional law and the structure of American government. The course focuses on the function, purposes, and limitations of judicial review; the balance of power between federal and state governments; the separation of national powers among the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of the federal government; and the Civil War amendments’ guarantees of equal protection and fundamental rights. (First Amendment rights are mostly reserved for Constitutional Law II.) The course further provides students with an understanding of constitutional law’s conceptual and historical foundations as well as of the enduring debates and tensions that shape the law’s continuing development. Particular attention goes to the competing theories of constitutional interpretation, to tensions between judicial review and democratic majoritarianism, and to the role that policy, moral, and political judgments have played in the development of constitutional doctrine and practice. Overall, the course offers a solid context and framework for understanding the constitution’s role in contemporary moral, political and legal disputes.
   
• Technology Governance and Regulation: Concepts 775/G (1cr hr)
  This single credit, pass/fail class is offered to all students at the beginning of each semester. The course serves as a foundation for other courses in the technology governance curriculum. It starts by introducing technical concepts, such as how computers and the Internet work, in a manner accessible to all students. It then continues with foundational legal concepts, such as the First and Fourth Amendments. The third portion of the class introduces regulatory concepts such as administrative and antitrust law. This course is available to online LLM students.
• Platforms: Speech and Media 787/G (2cr hr)
  This course deals with the law and practice of content governance in both online and more traditional media. The course will begin with an overview of basic First Amendment principles, and then proceed to more specific doctrines concerning the regulation of various types of sensitive subject matter including incitement, hate speech, pornography, and misinformation. The course will then examine the content governance practices of privately-owned online platforms. From here, the course will consider the First Amendment and statutory doctrines that shield and protect the editorial and content governance practices of various types of intermediaries—newspapers, broadcasters, cable providers, search engines, social platforms, and online platforms more generally. Finally, the course will discuss various levers of state influence over platforms’ handling of third-party content. This course is available to online LLM students. Pre-requisite: Technology Governance and Regulation: Concepts.