Note:
The following items are from a twice-a-year ("Spring/Summer" and "Fall/Winter")
publication of the University of Iowa College of Law, the Iowa Advocate,
distributed to alumni and friends of the Law School. [Address: Iowa Advocate,
College of Law, University of Iowa, Iowa City IA 52244-1113 USA.] Each
issue contains a section reporting activities of faculty members called
"Faculty Notes." The following items (in reverse chronological order --
most recent first) report a sampling of the activities of Nicholas Johnson.
[Last updated March 5, 2003.]
Nicholas
Johnson was invited to make a CLE presentation at the Iowa Intellectual
Property Law Association Annual Meeting in Amana, where he spoke on the
Supreme Court's recent decision in the Eldred case. Members of the
Iowa Utilities Board asked that he address the 2002 National Rural Telecommunications
Congress "Building Demand for Broadband" Conference in Des Moines. And
he spoke on legal ethics at the Symposium on Ethics and the Tudor Study
at the City University of New York. His article, "Is the Commons a Useful
Framework?" appeared in the summer issue of the Boston Review. He
has written op ed newspaper columns for the Omaha World Herald,
Des Moines Register, Cedar Rapids Gazette, Quad City Times,
and Iowa City Press-Citizen on everything from terrorism and Iraq,
Iowa's taxation and funding of education, alternative high schools and
open meetings law, to pharmaceutical reform. He appeared as a guest on
Oregon Public Radio's Jefferson Exchange discussing media censorship,
and Iowa City's Education Exchange Live, discussing the Haefner
Award he has created for high school students' projects in civic education.
His Web site, www.nicholasjohnson.org, complete with student seminar papers,
is now receiving regular visits from users in 129 countries.
He has had chapters published in two books since the last Faculty Notes listing. They are "A Millenarian View of Artists and Audiences," Chapter 18 ("Epilogue") in Michael Suman and Gabriel Rossman, Advocacy Groups and the Entertainment Industry (Westport: Praeger, 2000), and "Georgia's Media Future: Options and Opportunities for the Third Millennium," Chapter 17 in Laura Lengel, ed., Culture @nd Technology in the New Europe: Civic Discourse in Transformation in Post-Communist Nations (Stamford: Ablex Publishing 2000).
As a member of the Iowa City Community School District Board he has published an additional 13 columns dealing with K-12 education issues in the Iowa City Press-Citizen. His article, “Money Rules: 3rd Parties Are Answer to Special Interests,” was published by the Quad-City Times. He participated in Chris Lydon's network radio program, "The Connection" when the topic was "Decoding Hollywood Politics and Interests in Campaign 2000."
His teaching includes the Economics of Law Practice seminar and Law of Electronic Media in the fall, and the Cyberspace Law Seminar in the spring. He has been using the Internet in connection with his teaching since 1979, and his site is now regularly visited by users from 75 countries.
Nicholas Johnson added
a new seminar, Economics
of Law Practice, during the fall 1999 semester, to his regular Law
of Electronic Media and Cyberspace
Law Seminar courses. The new seminar is designed to encourage law students
to expand their thinking about the range of ways in which their future
legal services can be compensated.
He also was asked by the University's Department of Theatre Arts to teach a graduate seminar for its students on Entertainment Law and Business during the spring 1999 semester.
As he has done for the past few years, all courses involve his and students' posting of material on the Internet. His main web site is http://www.nicholasjohnson.org.
Johnson has submitted chapters for two forthcoming books. The epilogue for Advocacy and Media, edited by UCLA professor Michael Suman, is titled "A Millenarian View of Artist and Audience." The other is for the book of a British professor, Laura Lengel: Culture and Technology in the New Europe: Civic Discourse in Transformation in PostSocialist Nations. His chapter is titled "Georgia's Media Future."
He recently has been asked to join the board, or advisory board, of two new media-related organizations: the Soros-funded Open Society Institute Media Group and the Center for an Independent Public Broadcasting.
His service on the Iowa City Community School District school board has curtailed his international travel. However, he did accept an invitation from the United States Information Agency to travel to Bulgaria to speak and meet with journalists and government officials. The meetings dealt with the law and regulations regarding the media's coverage of Bulgarian elections. He has since created a Bulgarian web site with related information as a link off of his main web page.
Johnson continues to write
his
regular column for the Iowa City Press-Citizen regarding K-12
and school board issues and to do occasional other writing and radio interviews.
Most recently he was a guest on Chris Lydon's NPR program, "The
Connection," when the subject was media mergers. All of his writing
and speeches and other resources can be found from his web site main page:
http://www.nicholasjohnson.org.
He spoke at the law school's Continuing Legal Education program, "Legal Issues Affecting Entrepreneurs and Start Up Businesses" on the subject, "On-Line Commerce Issues and Information Age Technologies: Opportunity or Pitfall."
Johnson traveled to Tbilisi, in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia, under the auspices of the American Bar Association Central and East European Law Initiative (ABA/CEELI) program. He assisted the Georgian Parliament's drafting of a law of broadcasting and freedom of information. He subsequently published an on-line Web site containing many links to information about Georgia and its parliament in general, and this media law project in particular. Access the site at http://soli.inav.net/~njohnson/njgeorgi.html.
He has continued his work with the Aspen Institute's Communication and Society Program, most recently meetings of the "Working Group on Digital Broadcasting and the Public Interest," an advisory group to a White House task force.
He was selected as a presenter and participant for the Warsaw (Poland) Journalism Center's Journalist in Cyberspace Conference. He spoke on "Regulating the Cyber-Journalist," and subsequently published an online Web site report of that conference, available at: http://www.uiowa.edu/~cyberlaw/wjcc. A full interview with Johnson was published in the Warsaw Business Journal.
He spoke to The Club of Iowa City about the ethical, legal and social issues involved in the Internet ("ELSI in a Tangled Web"). "Dogs, Mangers, Growth and Greed: Striking a Balance in Digital Copyright," was the title of his keynote address at the 8th Annual "Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference" in Austin, Texas. He later returned to Austin to deliver the keynote address ("Twenty-Five Years of Award-Winning Public Access") for the 25th Anniversary celebration of the Austin Community Access Center. He appeared with the retiring director of the University of Iowa's International Writers Project, Clark Blaise, at a Cedar Rapids Public Library program, "Conversations With Books."
Johnson's article, "Sailing Shark-Infested Waters: A Map for Media Literacy," was published in Smart TV. The Readers Digest reprinted a quote from him. His op ed comments about the University's "Stepping Up" project to control binge drinking, "Focus Wrong to Attack Alcohol Problem," appeared in the Iowa City Press-Citizen. New Zealand radio interviewed Johnson regarding the broadcast of President Clinton's grand jury testimony.
Finally, Nicholas Johnson ran for, and
was elected to, the Iowa City Community School District Board in September
[1998]. He has since created a Web site with links to numerous K-12
educational policy resources as well as his own writing on the subject:
http://soli.inav.net/~njohnson/schoolboard.
He has, in this role, been writing a column on education issues every two
weeks for the Iowa City Press-Citizen. The columns are available
from his web site.
He earlier delivered the keynote address for the Iowa City Community School District fall opening workshop for all teachers and administrators, August 20. He spoke on "Schools for the New Millennium."
His article, "Full Circle: General Semantics and the Law," was the lead article in the summer issue of ETC., the quarterly journal of the International Society for General Semantics. The piece introduced two articles about general semantics and the law: Randall P. Bezanson's, "The 'Meaning' of First Amendment Speech," and a reprint of an article by Johnson's late father, speech pathology professor Wendell Johnson, titled "Reducing Misunderstandings in Trying to Reach Agreements" (first published in the Iowa Law Review).
His op ed column, published in New York's Newsday, "Is It Better TV or a Clearer Wasteland?" was widely reprinted in many newspapers, including the Atlanta Constitution, Baltimore Sun, Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Greensboro (NC) News & Record, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and Seattle Times. "Respect for the Boob Tube? Not Yet," an op-ed guest column for the Cedar Rapids Gazette, responded to another columnist regarding the state of "journalism" in most of today's newspapers and local TV newscasts. It was subsequently reprinted in the Humanists of Iowa newsletter.
These articles, and much more, are available in full text from Johnson's rapidly expanding web site: http://www.soli.inav.net/~njohnson
The trip served as the basis for Johnson's "Cyberspace Law Seminar" during the spring semester 1997. The seminar emphasized two themes: the growing globalization of business (and law practice) and of telecommunications. Students selected and described an Asian country of choice, proposed a telecommunications or media business that would generate a billion dollars a year, listed the range of legal problems raised, and addressed one of them in detail. They used the law of their country when available, and substituted U.S. law when not.
The Internet was not only a part of the subject matter for the course, but a major reference and research source. And once the papers have been finally edited for publication they will be available to everyone in the world with Internet access to the seminar Web page at the University.
Johnson made space available for the seminar from his personal Web page. Its address is: http://soli.inav.net/~njohnson/ This "page" is, in fact, a collection of hundreds of pages of Johnson's writing. It includes the full text of his 300-page-plus bibliography; two of his books, and 25 of his articles and transcripts from the past 12 months. It has links to some 600 other sites with legal and other resources and has a number of other features.
He has also prepared the "Wendell Johnson Memorial Web Page" to recognize and honor his father, for whom the University's Wendell Johnson Speech and Hearing Clinic was named. It, likewise, contains links to the full text of books, chapters and articles by and about Wendell Johnson, and was opened to the public, at the Clinic, on what would have been his father's 91st birthday.
His addresses included the use of the Iowa Communications Network to teach a class at Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa, from an ICN studio in Iowa City, the keynote address at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library for a National Issues Forum, a presentation to the Iowa City Community School District Curriculum Review Group, and the keynote address to the Iowa Library Association's last annual convention.
Articles included a lengthy interview in Chile's leading newspaper, El Mercurio, the lead article in the General Semantics Bulletin, a chapter (in Spanish) in the Cuadernos de Informacion, an article in Australian Communications, the introduction to a special issue of the Iowa City Press-Citizen on the impact of technology, and an op-ed column for the Newsday newspaper about high definition television.
Johnson has completed a new casebook, Law of Electronic Media in a Cyberspace Age, which takes a global look at new technology.
He also continues his role as a fellow and member of the executive committee of the World Academy of Art and Science, the board of directors for Volunteers in Technical Assistance (VITA), and the advisory board for the Central European Center for Health and the Environment, which he joined in fall 1996.
A book-length bibliography of Johnson's lifetime writings and public presentations has been compiled. Nicholas Johnson: A Bibliography (1952-1995), is to be available electronically on the Internet and in hard copy at libraries.
Johnson is one of a few professors testing The West Education Network (TWEN). He taught an online seminar in conjunction with his course "Law of Electronic Media." Both are devoted to exploring the legal issues raised by the new electronics technologies.
Since 1993 Johnson has had a World Wide Web page providing fulltext access to some of his writings as well as a bibliography (http://www.sunnyside.com). Two of his books, How to Talk Back to Your Television Set (Little Brown/Bantam, 1970) and Test Pattern for Living (Bantam, 1972) are now on the site.
Johnson's article "Save Free Speech in Cyberspace" has been published in both English and the Japanese editions of Wired.
Johnson serves on advisory or directors' boards for several non-profit organizations, including Center for Media Education, International Society for General Semantics, Project Censored (which reports each year's "Ten Best-Censored Stories"), Volunteers in Technical Assistance (Third World communications through inexpensive, low-orbit satellites), Working Assets Long Distance, World Academy of Art and Science, and Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR).
Over the past year Johnson has delivered a number of public lectures, including "Locating Iowa in the Infocosm" at a UI Office of University Relations retreat; "Impact of New Technology on the 21st-Century Office," an American Management Association program distributed by satellite throughout North America and the Caribbean; and "A Walk on the Wired Side," for the Building Materials Industrial Relations Group. In March [1996] he led a panel at the Media and Democracy Congress in San Francisco and presented keynote addresses at the Association of Banyan [computer network] Users International in Chicago and at a Duke University conference for former Soviet Union journalists.
In December Johnson published an article, "Jefferson on the Internet," in the December 1994 Federal Communications Law Journal. He also gave a talk, "Infocosm: A Nice Place to Visit, but . . .," at the Chicago Technology Skill Group "Road to Tomorrow" conference. During the latter part of the month Johnson spent two weeks in Costa Rica, meeting with government and industry officials in the media, technology, telecommunications, and computer fields.
During the spring semester Johnson taught "Law of Electronic Media," in which students explore the public policy and legal issues surrounding the new electronics technology of their choice. In February [1995] he addressed Unitarian-Universalist Church audiences in Iowa City and in Clearwater, Fla., on First Amendment electronic technologies issues, and in March he spoke at Des Moines Area Community College on "Is There Any News in Local TV News?"
Also in March, Johnson was elected to the board of directors of the Iowa Civil Liberties Union and attended his first board meeting in Des Moines. Johnson is finishing his second term on the board of directors of Common Cause and is continuing to serve on the executive board of the World Academy of Art and Science.
Johnson was invited to present the 1995 Richard P. Gifford Lecture in the Business Environment in April at Lynchburg College, Lynchburg, Va. His topic was "Life and Love in the Information Age." Also that month he spoke at the inauguration of the new president of Rosary College, Chicago, on the impact of the information age on a liberal arts education.
Johnson continues his work with the Aspen Institute's Communications and Society program and with a project of Duke University and Carter Center of Emory University, chaired by former President Jimmy Carter, "Commission on Radio and Television Policy, Working Group on Radio and Television Autonomy and the State," with broadcasters and scholars from the United States and the former Soviet Union. His paper "An Autonomous Media," presented at the group's May meeting, has been published in English and Russian.
Johnson was invited to present the keynote address, "Television in the Electronic Supermarket: The Confusion of Interests," to The Cinemathek, Internationales Fernsehfest [The Cologne Conference], Cologne, Germany. His interview on information services, for the public radio program "Living on Earth," has been rebroadcast several times.
This fall [1994] Johnson addressed a University of Iowa news services seminar for working journalists, "Election '94: Politics in the Information Age."
Two of Johnson's brief opinion pieces on public health issues have been published: "Suing the Tobacco Industry is a Solution," Iowa City PressCitizen, and "Serve Kids First, Then get Back to Greed," The Cedar Rapids Gazette. His article "Freedom, Fun, and Fundamentals: Defining Digital Progress in a Democratic Society" was published by ETC: A Review of General Semantics. Another article, "Die Verwirrung der Interessen: Fernsehen im electronischen Supermarkt," was published in the German journal agenda.
Johnson continues as a member of several professional and advisory boards. Recently he has been most active in Common Cause, on the long-range planning working group, which prepared a paper, "Brainstorming a Future for Common Cause," and VITA (Volunteers in Technical Assistance), which is about to launch low-orbiting satellites that will provide communications for Third World countries. As a member of the executive committee for the World Academy of Art and Science, Johnson helped prepare for the recent five-year Assembly of Fellows, where he chaired the opening panel, "The Spread of Knowledge."
Johnson attended the firstever reunion of all U.S. Supreme Court law clerks (Johnson clerked for Justice Hugo L. Black, 1959-60), held this past summer in conjunction with the American Bar Association meeting in New Orleans, which he also attended.
Johnson has established a computer site on the Internet (cpsr.org), where a sampling of his current writing is available to any of the Internet's 20 million users worldwide. He has proposed a similar "library" for selected University of Iowa faculty members on an Internet site in Iowa City.
Last summer Johnson was invited by the Republic of Kazakhstan State Radio and Television Company to consult with government officials there about a new broadcasting law consistent with the republic's move to democracy and a market economy. Johnson, director of the Kazakhstan Project, based at the Iowa law school, has presented his findings about Kazakhstan media to a meeting of the Carter Center's Commission on Radio and Television Policy, in Atlanta. The Kazakhstan Project includes broadcasters and others from the newly independent states of the former Soviet Union and from the United States. To increase his effectiveness as director of the group, Johnson began studying Russian during the spring semester [1994].
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in Atlanta, has asked Johnson to participate in a conference of public health professionals and media representatives from Hollywood and New York. Participants will explore how to incorporate more positive public health behaviors in entertainment television and feature films.
Johnson coauthored "Firearm Injuries: Public Health Recommendations" and is sole author of "A Public Health Response to Handgun Injuries: Prescription -- Communication and Education," in American Journal of Preventive Medicine. He was asked to write the lead article, "The Nature of Information," in the Aspen Institute/ Northern Telecom Institute for Information Studies 199394 annual review, The Knowledge Economy.
Johnson continues to publish op/ed newspaper columns, most recently "Ask Not What You Can Do to Your President" and "Roadkill along the Information Superhighway." A transcript of his ABC Nightline appearance is available from Mead Data's Nexis.
In March Johnson presented the keynote address, "Freedom, Fun, and Fundamentals: Defining Digital Progress in a Democratic Society," to the Third Conference on Computers, Freedom, and Privacy, in San Francisco. He continues to write op/ed pieces and recently published "Needed Slogan: 'It's Public Financing of Campaigns, Stupid' " in the Cedar Rapids Gazette.
Johnson continues as an active national board member of Common Cause, a major project of which is campaign finance reform. He also is codirector of the University's Institute for Health, Behavior, and Environmental Policy, which is pursuing funding for one of Johnson's projects on the relationship between entertainment television programming themes and public health practices of heavy television viewers.
During the fall and spring semesters, Johnson co-taught a section of Constitutional Law, handling the writing portion of the course during the spring semester. This spring [1993] Johnson took an innovative approach to his course Law of Electronic Media. In order that his students have access to topics and issues that were only days or weeks old, Johnson had them obtain all of their reading materials in electronic form. The students' original research and papers will be assembled in book form.
Johnson fulfilled his summer faculty obligations to the University of California San Diego Advanced Management Network, International Executive Forum (a global computer network of government, military and corporate officials), by leading an "online" seminar for six weeks on the management of public health policy. He continues as Co-Director, Institute for Health, Behavior and Environmental Policy at the Univ. of Iowa and has been asked to serve on the Board of Working Assets Long Distance. Recently, he was also chosen by the Nominating Committee of the National Board, Common Cause, for nomination for re-election to that Board. He will be teaching his course in Mass Communications Law again this spring semester.
Johnson continues to teach his Mass Media Law and Law of Electronic Media courses, and, earlier in November, attended the John Marshall Law School Conference on Freedom of Information in the Electronic Era.
Johnson also continues as a faculty member of the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute International Executive Forum, a global computer network based in La Jolla, California, that includes corporate, government, military and academic executives from around the world in public policy discussions. Twice a year the group meets for a week in La Jolla where, last July, Johnson led a seminar in public health public policy, subsequently continued "online" hr another six weeks He was also asked to participate in a more broadlybased computer conference run by WBSI, bringing together advocates on all sides of the abortion issue in an effort to fashion some consensus legislation.
As a member of the National Board of Common Cause, he participated in the 20th Anniversary celebration in September, attended the board meeting in November, serves on the legal affairs committee, and has been experimenting with the creation of national computer networks hr the Common Cause state offices and membership.
His current work-in-progress involves an exploration of the First Amendment rights of prisoners as reporters for commercial mass media.