Levin College of Law
Welcome to UF LAW

Mark Fenster

Marshall M. Criser Eminent Scholar Chair in Electronic Communications and Administrative Law
Professor of Law

Expertise

Administrative Law  • Federal Administrative Law  • Freedom of Information Act  • Government Information  • Legislation  • Regulatory Takings  • Statutory Interpretation  • 

About

Mark Fenster is the Marshall M. Criser Eminent Scholar Chair in Electronic Communications and Administrative Law at the Levin College of Law. His legal research has focused on nondisclosure agreements, government transparency, legal intellectual history, and constitutional limits on government regulation. He is the author of the book The Transparency Fix: Secrets, Leaks, and Uncontrollable Government Information (Stanford University Press, 2017), and his articles and essays have appeared in the California Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Iowa Law Review, Hastings Law Journal, Administrative Law Review, among others. He is also the author of Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture, 2nd ed. (University of Minnesota Press, 2008), an influential work of cultural and political theory.

Professor Fenster joined the UF faculty in 2001. He currently teaches Contracts, Statutory Interpretation, and Incarceration and the Law, and in the past has also taught Property, Torts, Administrative Law, Land Use, Intellectual Property, and Payment Systems. Prior to working at UF Law, Professor Fenster clerked for Judge Carlos F. Lucero of the Tenth Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals in Denver and worked in private practice in San Francisco as an Environmental and Land Use Law Fellow at Shute Mihaly & Weinberger.

Fenster earned his J.D. degree from Yale Law School and holds a PhD from the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He earned his BA from the University of Virginia, and an MA from the Radio-Television-Film program at the University of Texas at Austin. He is admitted to practice law in New York and California.

Education

J.D., Yale Law School
Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Institute of Communications Research
M.A., University of Texas at Austin
Department of Radio/Television/Film
B.A., University of Virginia

Teaching and Scholarship

Administrative Law; Legislation/ Statutory Interpretation; Contracts; Government Transparency; Legal, Social, and Political Theory.

Courses

  • Contracts
  • Statutory Interpretation

Publications

Books

Articles and Essays

Book Chapters

  • Feed: State Transparency Amidst Informational Surplus, in This Obscure Thing Called Transparency: Politics and Aesthetics of a Contemporary Metaphor (Emmanuel Alloa ed., Leuven University Press forthcoming 2022).
  • “What Do Leaks Reveal? Foreign Policy, National Security, and the Contingent Effects of Informational Vigilantism,” in Foreign Policy Secrecy in the Age of transparency (Vigjilenca Abazi & Guri Rosen, eds., Oxford University Press 2021).
  • “FOIA as an Administrative Law,” in Troubling Transparency: The Freedom of Information Act and Beyond 52 (David Pozen & Michael Schudson eds., Columbia University Press 2018)
  • “The Informational Ombudsman: Fixing Open Government by Institutional Design,” in Freedom of Information and Governmental Transparency in an Open Government Era (Irène Bouhadana, William Gilles, & Russell Weaver eds., Les Éditions IMODEV, 2016)

University of Florida Levin College of Law
309 Village Drive
PO Box 117620
Gainesville, FL 32611
(352) 273-0804
Text-Only Version

Tools

Website

Quick Links

The Florida Constitutional Law Endowment in memory of Justice Ben F. Overton was created by Judge Karen Miller in 2013. This fund supports lectures and presentations by Justices of the Florida Supreme Court at the Fredric G. Levin College of Law.

HISTORY

Justice Overton, who earned his B.S. in 1951 and his Juris Doctor in 1952 from the University of Florida, was the first merit appointment to the Florida Supreme Court. Throughout his career he was active in legal education and served as an Adjunct Professor at the Levin College of Law through December 2012, the month of his death. Although he resided at Oak Hammock at the University of Florida, a continuing care retirement community developed in cooperation with UF, he also considered the Florida Supreme Court “home.” Among the high points of his later years was hosting Justices of the Florida Supreme Court in Gainesville and taking his class to Tallahassee to hear oral arguments at the Florida Supreme Court.
Judge Miller, who earned her B.S. cum laude from New York University in 1974 and her Juris Doctor from New York Law School in 1977, served as Chief Administrative Law Judge of the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs, New York City’s business regulatory agency, before she retired to Oak Hammock at the University of Florida. Having accompanied Justice Overton on his excursions to Tallahassee and joined him in welcoming guests to Oak Hammock at the University of Florida, she created the endowment in memory of Justice Overton to ensure that the Levin College of Law continues to have the funding necessary to continue and enhance the interaction between its students and the Florida Supreme Court.

 

Judge Miller remembered the event that motivated the endowment.

 

Prior to a dinner at the home of Dean Robert Jerry and Lisa Jerry shortly after Justice Overton’s death, Justice Barbara Pariente and I were discussing a suitable memorial. Justice Pariente, who had been Justice Overton’s colleague on the Florida Supreme Court and who understood the importance to him of the interaction between his students and the Court, suggested the outline of what has become the Overton lectures. Dean Jerry, who has since retired, as has Dean Emeritus Jon Mills, who assumed responsibility for implementing the Overton lectures, were very supportive from the beginning. Since Dean Mills’ retirement, Professor Timothy McClendon, who assisted both Justice Overton and Dean Mills teaching Florida Constitutional Law and who co-authored the recent Florida Constitutional Law casebook, has continued the Overton lectures with the support of Interim Dean Merritt McAlister and CGR director, Professor Danaya Wright.

Justice Overton was a devoted jurist, educator, and ethical leader of the Florida legal profession. The Overton Lecture Series brings Florida Supreme Court Justices to the University of Florida, Levin College of Law, and serves to introduce students to the inner workings of the Court. CGR and the students of the College of Law extend our deepest gratitude to Judge Karen Miller for making the Overton Lectures possible in perpetuity.

You can watch an interview for the Florida Historical Society by Mary Adkins, professor emeritus of the UF Levin College of Law, with Justice Overton here.

Justice Overton was also interviewed for the Samuel Proctor Oral History Project and a transcript of his interview is available at the Smathers Library, and here.
Justice Overton sat on the Constitution Revision Commission of 1977-78 that proposed a right to privacy in the Florida Constitution. Although it failed as part of the Constitution Revision Commission recommendations, it passed in 1980 when proposed by the legislature. The bill was co-sponsored by our very own Jon Mills. The privacy provision prevailed by greater than 60%. Justice Overton then wrote a concurrence in a critical reproductive rights case in 1989 affirming that the privacy provision of the Florida Constitution included the right to obtain an abortion. That decision was overruled in Planned Parenthood of SW and Central Florida v. Florida. You can read about the role of Justice Overton, Jon Mills – director emeritus of CGR, and the history of the 1989 case here.