PROVO — Before RonNell Andersen Jones became one of the country’s leading experts on the First Amendment and media law, before she became a newspaper reporter, before she began giving lectures at Ivy League schools and teaching abroad, before she graduated first in her law class and clerked for the Supreme Court, before she taught at BYU …
… she raised a hog.
Not just any hog — the Box Elder County Fair grand champion hog.
“It was an incredible source of pride for my father,” she says. “He was prouder of that than when I graduated first in law school class.”
Jones was raised on an 80-acre cattle ranch in the Tremonton area, and if she seems a poor fit for that life it is only because she is, as she will tell you. Instead of prize hogs and cattle, she yearned for books, academia and learning, and that’s exactly what she’s gotten. You could get tired just reading what she has done. At the age of 40, she already has had at least three careers, first as a journalist and then as a practicing lawyer and now as a professor and lecturer.
Jones is associate dean of academic affairs and research at the BYU J. Reuben Clark Law School, but that’s merely her home base. She and her husband, K.C., pack up the family and move to London each summer, where she teaches in a study abroad program (she will also be a guest speaker at Oxford). During the school year she flies around the country giving about two dozen speeches annually on constitutional law and First Amendment issues — at Yale, Harvard, University of Alabama, University of Georgia.…
“I love the community of scholars I belong to,” she says.
Her work focuses on legal issues that face the press and — as frequently described in her bios — “the intersection of the media and courts.” She is considered an expert in reporter’s privilege and led a study of the frequency and effect of subpoenas served to reporters. When she isn’t speaking about such matters, she is writing about them for law reviews at prestigious universities. Her work has been referenced in debates in Congress and reported by The New York Times, USA Today and The Washington Post, as well as various cable news programs and National Public Radio.
“There are some times when the pace of life is exhausting, but never very often,” says Jones, the mother of two children. “I’m doing a lot of things that I love. I am driven by adrenaline and deadlines. It’s a magic combination.”
Jones is a long way from her roots. As a girl she was, in her words, “bookish, weak, asthmatic and pathetic,” which made her a poor ranch hand. She shared in the chores anyway, but when it came time to bring in the hay she got the easy duty of driving the truck while her siblings tossed bales on the back. During the summer, her mother had to chase her out of the house to get her to go outside.
Like many rural youths, she participated in 4-H, which included judging cattle, sheep and hogs, and assessing them for meat quality. What she really wanted to do was curl up in a corner with a pile of books. One of the highlights of her youth was when the bookmobile began showing up at her home.
“Books offered me a chance to keep exploring and think beyond the place I lived,” she says. “I would check out a pile of books, hoarding information. To this day I’m a fairly good trivia player.”
She relished the kind of things most kids detest — homework, reading and school. “My parents gave me lots of encouragement and support,” she says. “It was clear early on that school was my thing.”
Graduating from high school with a 4.0 grade-point average, she studied journalism and political science at Utah State, working full time at the Logan Herald Journal to pay her way through school (she reported for a number of other papers, as well, including the Deseret News). “I would take any reporting job anyone would throw at me,” she says. “I liked the pace of journalism. It offered something new every day.” She completed graduate studies in communications at the University of Nevada. All along, she had planned a career in journalism, but while covering the courts she decided to study law.
Trying to balance family and work complicated matters. She married K.C., another serious student who now directs research for engineering hybrid cars. They moved nearly a dozen times in their first 10 years of marriage while shuffling between career and school; when one was working, the other was going to school and vice versa. After considering several prestigious law schools, Jones chose Ohio State University because it provided the best opportunities for K.C. in automotive research and engineering. She worked full time as a reporter for the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch for two years before entering law school, giving her valuable practical experience in journalism that she could draw on later in her legal work for the media. She graduated from Ohio State No. 1 in her law class. By then she was already a lecturer on media law at Ohio Wesleyan.
“I always had dual interests in journalism and law and government,” she says. “I wanted to keep journalism and law on my plate. I didn’t make a conscious effort to leave journalism behind; I just wanted to study the law.”
The resume since then: She clerked for Judge William A. Fletcher of the U.S. Court of Appeals in the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco; she was an attorney for Jones Day, focusing on Supreme Court litigation; she clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, a married young mother working in a world dominated by white, male Harvard grads; she taught at the University of Arizona College of Law for four years; and she was hired by BYU in 2008.
A two-kid, two-career family has required what she calls “an ongoing family juggling act,” especially because both parents travel frequently.
“”We were saying last night there are probably families who would think our family’s pace is a bit much, but it’s actually a very nice fit,” she says. “We are adventurous. The kids are incredibly well-traveled. Our calendar is carefully executed — who is where and when and who is picking up the kids from gymnastics and mowing the lawn and so forth. We make sure with all the chaos that we have a lot of family time together, including dinner.”
She has two children, Max and Harper. She named the latter after Harper Lee, the author of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” a book she reads annually.
“It was a book that said to me that people who are committed to making a difference can make a difference,” she says.
Email: drob@deseretnews.com