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Estizer Smith

Estizer Smith is a Research Assistant at the Program on Democracy and the Internet and second year student at Stanford Law School.  Her research interests are oriented toward exploring what the future of participatory democracy looks like in the U.S. focusing primarily on elections, the future of free speech online, and the First Amendment more broadly, with an eye toward racial equity. Prior to matriculation at Stanford Law School, Estizer was a philanthropic program officer, where she designed and lead a national philanthropic press freedom granting strategy, funding legal and litigation support for nonprofit newsrooms, exploring potential innovations around libel and defamation insurance, and supporting resources for journalists facing in-person and online harassment. She also worked to support independent expenditure-side infrastructure building for direct voter contact in the 2020 election cycle. Estizer graduated summa cum laude from the University of Pittsburgh with a BA in Communications & Rhetoric, and Psychology.