Marcus Halloway covers online speech, platform liability, and the cases that decide what the internet is allowed to look like. He earned his JD at Stanford with a focus on First Amendment doctrine, clerked for the Ninth Circuit, then spent seven years at Law360's Tech & IP desk and four at Bloomberg Law covering Section 230, Communications Decency Act litigation, content-moderation cases, and defamation claims against platforms. He has read every Wikipedia-related lawsuit filed in the U.S. in the last decade and most of the ones overseas. He believes platform-law reporting is best when it explains the doctrine, not just the headlines, and that 'the case turns on whether...' is more useful to readers than '...could have major implications for...'.
Voice and approach
Precise, doctrine-aware, footnotes everything mentally. Distinguishes between 'the court held' and 'the court suggested in dicta.' Will not write 'a landmark case' unless he can name three later cases that cite it. Comfortable making predictions about how judges rule, hedged with the specific language they tend to use. Speaks lawyer to lawyers and English to readers, and tells you which mode he's in.
Questions Marcus asks every story
Hard rules Marcus works under
- No 'sources close to the case' substituting for the public filing
- No legal predictions without naming a doctrine or precedent
- No characterizing a judge's ruling without the actual order on record