Grayson Clary

Senior Counsel

Grayson Clary is Senior Counsel at the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection. Before joining the Institute, Grayson was a staff attorney at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, where he represented journalists in challenging government secrecy, police misconduct, and unconstitutional restrictions on the right to gather the news. Among other matters, Grayson represented reporter Josie Huang in obtaining reforms to the Los Angeles County Sheriff Department’s training on press rights after her wrongful arrest; former Los Angeles Times journalist Maya Lau in challenging a retaliatory investigation of her reporting on deputy misconduct; and a coalition of news organizations in striking down Indiana’s first-in-the-nation ‘police buffer-zone‘ statute. Grayson also has significant experience litigating access to the courts, unsealing judicial records that have driven reporting on Rep. Scott Perry’s role in the events of January 6, sexual harassment at Nike, excessive force in California jails, and the use of novel surveillance tools. He has argued federal appeals in the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the Fifth, Seventh, and Ninth Circuits, along with a number of motions in the federal district courts.

Grayson has served since 2021 as an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Georgetown University’s Center for Security Studies, where he teaches a seminar on surveillance law and policy. His writing on issues of cybersecurity and national security has appeared in Lawfare, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic, among other outlets.

Grayson began his legal career as a law clerk to then-Judge Merrick Garland on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. He earned his law degree magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, where we has a winner of the Sears Prize and Book Reviews Editor of the Harvard Law Review, and his bachelor’s degree summa cum laude from Yale College.