Susan Balter-Reitz is a Professor of Communication at Montana State University Billings. Balter-Reitz has been studying the limits of the First Amendment for the last 30 years, and she has published broadly on issues related to Freedom of Expression. Her work is informed by argumentation theory and conceptions of the public. Balter-Reitz has twice been nominated for the Franklyn Haiman award given by the National Communication Association to honor distinguished scholarship in Freedom of Expression; the work she collaborated on with Michael Bruner won this award in 2015.

Michael Lane Bruner (a.k.a. M. Lane Bruner) is Professor of Communication Studies and Affiliate Professor of Public Policy at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, with a well-established reputation for research in freedom of speech and civic engagement. Bruner’s work in these areas, spanning more than two decades, focuses primarily on legal rulings and legislation that appear on the surface to protect and expand free speech and citizen engagement when in fact they undermine the very public reason upon which sound legal and policy decisions are based. Bruner also ensures that his work on responsible public speech and civic engagement is applied. To that end, he teaches policy development and communication to policy professionals at the doctoral level and collaborative debate at the undergraduate level.

Over the last decade, Balter-Reitz and Bruner have been concerned with the attacks on public colleges and universities under the guise of protecting free expression. Examples include their 2011-2012 work, on the Westboro Baptist Church’s influence on Supreme Court rulings related to free speech and public spectacle, their 2016-2017 research on the cynical manipulation of university free speech rules by provocateurs such as Milo Yiannopoulous, and their most recent work on the passage of FORUM Acts in the United States presented at the National Communication Association Conference in 2022.