Maxwell S. Mishkin counsels and litigates on behalf of news, entertainment, and other media clients in a wide range of matters.
While in law school, Max was a student director of Yale's Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic, in which he briefed First Amendment and Freedom of Information Act cases in federal district courts and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and argued before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He also interned for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, where his work focused on intermediary liability issues.
Max previously was with the highly regarded First Amendment boutique law firm Levine Sullivan Koch & Schulz, which merged with Ballard Spahr in October 2017.
Representative Matters
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Defended the Associated Press against a libel claim brought by a Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, who objected to an AP report detailing his past business relationship with Paul Manafort, one-time manager of President Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. The court granted the AP's motion to dismiss after finding that Deripaska, a billionaire close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, was a public figure who failed to plausibly allege that AP published the report with "actual malice," as the First Amendment requires. The court further found that Deripaska failed to identify anything materially false in the AP report.
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Obtained a declaratory judgment for the Electronic Frontier Foundation under the SPEECH Act, a federal statute enacted in 2010 to combat "libel tourism." The United States District Court for the Northern District of California held that an Australian injunction attempting to censor EFF for publishing a "Stupid Patent of the Month" article is repugnant to U.S. law and public policy and is therefore unenforceable.
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Represented a coalition of Canadian media organizations to successfully challenge a request to seal the entire case file of divorce proceedings in a Maryland court involving Julie Payette, a former astronaut who at the time was designated the next Governor General of Canada, the nation's formal head of state.
