Ashley Fox joined the First Amendment Clinic as a legal fellow in August 2023. Immediately prior to joining the Clinic, Fox was a law clerk for Chief Judge Martin Reidinger on the U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina, where she worked on a variety of civil litigation matters.
Fox graduated in May 2021 with a J.D. from the University of North Carolina School of Law and an M.A. in Mass Communication from the Hussman School of Journalism and Media. She wrote her master’s thesis on campaign finance disclosure obligations for online political advertising and online platforms. While in law school, Fox was Editor-in-Chief of the First Amendment Law Review, and she worked as a Roy H. Park Fellow at the Hussman School, where she assisted faculty with courses and research projects related to media law and the First Amendment. She also worked as a Graduate Research Fellow at the UNC Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life, where she worked on the Center’s digital politics project. Fox externed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, and she interned with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, the U.S. Department of Justice, and Senator Durbin’s Judiciary Committee staff.
Fox received her bachelor’s degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with highest distinction. She is a member of the North Carolina bar.
Publications:
Ashley Fox, Note, Automated Political Speech: Regulating Social Media Bots in the Political Sphere, 18 First Amend. L. Rev. 114 (2020).
Victoria Smith Ekstrand & Ashley Fox, Regulating the Political Wild West: State Efforts to Disclose Sources of Online Political Advertising, 47 J. Legis. 74 (2020-2021).
David Ardia, Evan Ringel, Victoria Smith Ekstrand, & Ashley Fox, Addressing the decline of local news, rise of platforms, and spread of mis- and disinformation online: A summary of current research and policy proposals (2020) (white paper published by the UNC Center for Media Law and Policy; the UNC Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media; and the UNC Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life following two-day interdisciplinary conference, “Fostering an Informed Society: The Role of the First Amendment in Strengthening Local News and Democracy,” held in Nov. 2019).