Stuart N. Brotman

Stuart N. Brotman is an American government policymaker; university professor; management consultant; lawyer; author and editorial adviser; and non-profit organization executive. He has taught students from 42 countries in six separate disciplines--Communications, Journalism, Business, Law, International Relations and Public Policy. He also has advised private and public sector clients in more than 30 countries on five continents.

Biography

Brotman is the inaugural Howard Distinguished Endowed Professor of Media Management and Law and Beaman Professor of Communication and Information at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.^[1] This position is the only one of its kind in the world. He serves as a nonresident senior fellow in the Government Studies Program, Center for Technology Innovation at The Brookings Institution in Washington, DC.^[2] He also is an honorary adjunct professor at the Jindal Global Law School in India ^[3] and an affiliated researcher at the Media Management Transformation Centre of the Jönköping International Business School in Sweden.^[4] He serves as an appointed arbitrator and mediator at the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva, Switzerland.

After graduating with a BS degree, summa cum laude, from Northwestern University, Brotman received his MA in communications from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his JD from the University of California at Berkeley, where he served as Note and Comment Editor of the California Law Review. He also completed advanced professional training in negotiation and mediation at Harvard Law School.

He served as the Fulbright-Nokia Distinguished Chair in Information and Communications Technologies in the Faculty of Social Science/Media and Communication Studies at the University of Helsinki.^[5] He also served two terms as an appointed member of the US State Department Advisory Committee on International Communications and Information Policy, and was an inaugural member of the Library of Congress Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel. Brotman served as special assistant to the president’s principal communications policy adviser and chief of staff at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).

Brotman also serves as president of Stuart N. Brotman Communications, a global management consulting firm, with clients in over 30 countries. He is a senior adviser in telecommunications, Internet, media, entertainment and sports. He has worked on $150 billion of mergers and acquisitions, and as an expert witness in litigation matters totaling over $2 billion. He also practiced international corporate law in Washington, DC, and on Wall Street at Winthrop, Stimson, Putnam and Roberts (now Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman), where he founded the Communications, Information and Entertainment Practice Group.

Brotman served as president and CEO of the Museum of Television & Radio (now called The Paley Center for Media), where he oversaw museum operations in New York City and Los Angeles and enabled the museum to make major strides in its transition from a bicoastal 20th-century museum to a 21st-century institution with global reach.^[6] He was an executive producer of Funniest Families of Television Comedy: A Museum of Television & Radio Special, that aired in prime time on the ABC Television Network.

He has held faculty appointments in international telecommunications and intellectual property at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and the Boston University School of Law. He is a visiting professor of law at Harvard Law School, where he teaches entertainment and media law. He also was the first Harvard Law School faculty member to teach telecommunications law. He also is a faculty member in Harvard Law School’s Institute for Global Law and Policy. He held the first concurrent appointment in digital media at Harvard and MIT, respectively at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the Program on Comparative Media Studies. Brotman also serves as an annual visiting lecturer in Entertainment and Media Law at Stanford Law School.

Brotman also served as a senior fellow at The Annenberg Washington Program in Communications Policy Studies, Northwestern University and as an information technology fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.^[7]

Professional affiliations, honors and awards

In 2000, Brotman was named the first USA Telecommunications Eisenhower Fellow, based in Budapest, Hungary.^[8] He currently serves as a director of the Telecommunications Policy Research Institute, an Advisory Board Member at the Future of Privacy Forum and on the Advisory Council of the Global Internet Freedom Program of The Media Institute.

Brotman has served as chairman of the United States-Israel Science and Technology Foundation and the American Bar Association’s International Communications Law Committee. He also has served on the boards of the Berkeley Law Alumni Association, The Museum of Television & Radio, and on the editorial advisory boards of the Berkeley Technology Law Journal, Federal Communications Law Journal, the Journal of Biolaw & Business and the Journal of Science & Technology Law. He served as a senior mentor of the Henry Crown Fellowship Program at The Aspen Institute, and is an elected member of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences and the National Press Club. He also is an honorary member of the China Broadcasters Association—the first American to be named for this honor.

He is a recipient of the Northwestern University Alumni Merit Award for distinguished professional achievement and the Distinguished Alumnus Award in Communications from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.^[9]

Brotman is the only two-time recipient of Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Broadcast Education Association in Law and Policy (2014) and in Scholarship (2016).^[10]

He is a member of the State Bar of California, the Bars of the Supreme Court of the United States and the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the American Bar Association and the Federal Communications Bar Association.

Publications

Brotman has written over 300 articles and reviews on business, technology, policy, history, negotiation, law, regulation and international trade that have appeared in scholarly and professional publications, including Bloomberg Business Week, The Boston Globe, Broadcasting, Cable Communications Magazine, Chicago Tribune, The Christian Science Monitor, Communications Week, Electronic Media, Forbes, Journal of Communication, Legal Times, MIT Technology Review, Multichannel News, The National Law Journal, The New York Times, U.S. News & World Report, The Wilson Quarterly and The Washington Post.

He is the editor of The Telecommunications Deregulation Sourcebook,^[11] a reference volume covering the broadcasting, cable television and telephone industries; Telephone Company and Cable Television Competition,^[12] an anthology dealing with technical, economic and regulatory aspects of broadband networks; and the author of Broadcasters Can Negotiate Anything,^[13] a best-selling management education book for radio and television executives published by the National Association of Broadcasters. He also is the author of Communications Law and Practice,^[14] the leading treatise covering domestic and international telecommunications and electronic mass media regulation.

Brotman is a frequent analyst for leading newspapers and magazines, including Fortune, Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Time, and The Wall Street Journal. He also has provided expert commentary for ABC's World News This Morning, NBC's Today Show and NPR's Morning Edition. He appears as a featured speaker at major academic and industry conferences in North America, Europe, Asia, Australia, Latin America and the Middle East.

References