Sep 21, 2020
Sarah Matthews
Freedom of the Press

Sarah Matthews

Staff Attorney
Sarah Matthews

Sarah Matthews is a staff attorney with the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, where she focuses on providing intake support to First Look Media's Press Freedom Defense Fund. Sarah litigates cases, drafts amicus briefs, provides pre-publication assistance to journalists, and oversees the publication of and updates to the Reporters Committee's legal guides. She also helps supervise the Reporters Committee's hotline for journalists, and serves on the advisory committees of the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker and the Red Press Initiative. In addition, Sarah teaches media law at American University's School of Communication.

Before joining the Reporters Committee, Sarah was associate principal counsel at The Walt Disney Company. Prior to that, she was a litigation associate at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, LLP, where she focused on First Amendment, media law, and entertainment cases and represented the Reporters Committee on a pro bono basis. Before joining Gibson Dunn, Sarah clerked for the Honorable Renée Marie Bumb on the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey.

Sarah earned her J.D. from New York University School of Law, where she was an editor and contributing writer for the Journal of Law & Liberty. During law school, Sarah clerked at media law firms Davis Wright Tremaine, LLP and Levine Sullivan Koch and Schulz, LLP, as well as at Human Rights Watch. Prior to law school, she interned as a reporter at Newsweek and served as communications director for a national education nonprofit. Sarah earned her bachelor's degree, magna cum laude, from Brown University, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.