Erin Miller teaches constitutional law, criminal procedure and free speech theory at USC Gould. Her research explores the philosophical foundations of free speech rights, with a particular focus on the First Amendment, mass media and the relationship between private power and democratic discourse. She also writes on moral and criminal responsibility, bringing insights from political theory and philosophy to constitutional and criminal law. Miller received the 2023 Future Promise Award from the Association of American Law Schools Section on Jurisprudence, recognizing outstanding early-career scholarship at the intersection of law and philosophy.
Please introduce yourself.
I’m Erin Miller, an associate professor of law & philosophy. I write in free speech theory, and I teach First Amendment, Criminal Procedure, Constitutional Law: Rights, and a seminar called “Philosophical Issues in Free Speech.”
What is your interpretation of law and philosophy? How would you describe it to someone who didn’t know about this specific niche?
Law & philosophy (or legal philosophy) asks what law (or a specific area of law) is: what kind of social practice it is, what values underlie it, and what it ought to be.
Can you briefly describe the focus of your research? What gap in existing knowledge do you hope to fill or add to with your scholarship?
Nearly all of my scholarship attempts to explain why freedom of speech is so valuable that it is worth bearing heavy costs in order to secure it. I find the existing answers to this question inspiring, but not fully satisfying. One part of my answer is that the freedom to speak is critical to our ability to think freely, and to produce collective knowledge — and that this freedom of thought underlies many other values we care about. Lately I’ve also been interested in how principles of free speech spill beyond the classical case of government censorship. How should they apply, for instance, to private actors who interfere with speech, or to new technologies that demote, rather than outright ban, speech? A recent paper of mine argues, against current doctrinal consensus, that the First Amendment should apply to private media companies whose power over public discourse resembles that of the government in critical respects.
Tell us a bit about your motivation for your specialty area.
I have always been interested in free speech, because I think it’s one of the most important values in an enlightened society — and that it is and should be a bipartisan value. I worry when free speech gets reduced to a rhetorical move in political debates.
Please tell us how you arrived at Gould.
After law school, I did a Ph.D. in political philosophy because I knew I wanted to write about theoretical questions in law and craved a methodology for approaching them. Then I re-entered the legal academy by teaching legal research and writing at the University of Chicago for a couple of years. I came to Gould afterwards, in 2021. Part of what drew me was the talented law & philosophy faculty here. I still can’t quite believe I get to count them as colleagues.
What do you hope your students take away from your courses? What would success as a professor look like for you?
Of course I want my students, above all, to understand the law. That’s what they’re here to do. But understanding means much more than simply being able to regurgitate legal principles verbatim. I want students to be able to deftly apply those principles to events they encounter in the real world; to be alert to when they might apply; to see ambiguities in them; to get why they are the way they are and the ways they might have been otherwise; and to connect them to other principles and broader legal ideas. Some of my favorite teaching moments are when a student comes to me with some First Amendment or Criminal Procedure or philosophical issue that they spotted in the news or everyday life. And then — on my best days — I want students to decide what they think about the law: whether it’s the sort of law we ought to have.
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