Alexander Papachristou
Alexander Papachristou is director of Lawyers for Reporters, managing fundraising, governance, and law firm relations, and, in client representation, focuses on corporate formation and governance, journalistic collaborations and other transactions, and employment and contracting.
He serves as executive director of the Cyrus R. Vance Center for International Justice. He previously was president of the Near East Foundation, a participatory, community-based economic and social development organization working in Arab and African countries. For the preceding 18 years, Papachristou engaged in cross-border corporate finance in advisory and proprietary roles: he served as managing director and general counsel at NCH Capital, Inc, which invests in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe; he lived in Russia from 1989 to 1993, where he opened and ran the Moscow office of White & Case. Papachristou is a member of the board of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, as well as the advisory council of Bard College’s Center for Civic Engagement. In late 2011, The New Press published Blind Goddess: A Race and Justice Reader, which Papachristou edited.
Papachristou received an LLM and JD from Harvard Law School and an AB from Princeton University, as well as Arabic language training at the American University in Cairo.
Kay Murray
Kay Murray serves as Managing Attorney and brings extensive experience in media law, copyright and fair use, and nonprofit governance to Lawyers for Reporters.
She has counseled and represented news organizations, writers, documentary filmmakers and nonprofit organizations for more than 30 years. Kay served as in-house counsel at First Look Institute, Tribune Publishing and the Open Society Foundations, and as General Counsel at the Authors Guild, where she was also Executive Editor of the Authors Guild Bulletin and Executive Director of the Authors Guild Foundation. She co-authored The Writers Legal Guide (3d ed.). Most recently, Kay was of counsel at the media law firm of Baron Harris Healey, where she advised documentary filmmakers and nonprofit organizations.
Kay graduated from Northwestern University Law School, where she was Articles Editor of the Journal of Crime and Criminology, and from Xavier University, where she was the Outstanding University Humanities Scholar.
Carla Pierini Borenstein
Carla Pierini Borenstein is a staff attorney for Lawyers for Reporters, focusing on client representation, especially in the areas of free speech, defamation, and copyright. She previously worked at two international law firms. Her practice focused on developing and implementing anti-corruption measures at multinational corporations. Most recently, Pierini Borenstein was a legal producer and writer for two top-ranked weekly podcasts on U.S. law and politics. Prior to attending law school, she worked as a freelance reporter for a local Spanish-language newspaper in the Washington D.C. metropolitan area.
Admitted to practice law in New York and the District of Columbia, Pierini Borenstein received her JD degree cum laude from the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, with a joint master’s degree in Medical Humanities and Bioethics from the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. She also received an LLM in International Human Rights & Humanitarian Law from the Washington College of Law at American University, an Accelerated Master of Public Health from Columbia University, and a Bachelor of Arts from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.
She is a native Spanish speaker, fluent in Portuguese, and conversational in French.
Sean Phee
Sean Phee is the program assistant for Lawyers for Reporters. He is responsible for case management and coordination of client and law firm communications. Prior to Lawyers for Reporters, he worked for the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and worked as a freelance writer in the New York City area. He received his BA in political science from Southern Illinois University where he wrote for his college newspaper and attended the Columbia University School of Professional Studies.