Professor Monroe Price, Legal and Communication Scholar Whose Work Spanned the Globe, Passes Away at 87

The Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania mourns the passing of Monroe E. Price, J.D., retired Adjunct Professor of Communication and a towering figure in the field of international communication. He passed away at the age of 87 on March 16, 2026. 

A legal scholar, a communication theorist, and an institution builder, Price built a career that defies any categorization. Over five decades, he left his mark on fields as varied as Native American law, freedom of expression, media reform, and cross-border communication in the global system.

Throughout his illustrious career, Price held faculty positions at the Annenberg School, the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University, and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Law. He was dean of the Cardozo School of Law from 1982 to 1991 and founded the Howard M. Squadron Program in Law, Media and Society at the Cardozo School.

His scholarly publications were just as varied and consequential. Price published extensively on communication, media law, and copyright, including the seminal works “Television, the Public Sphere, and National Identity,” “Law and the American Indian,” “Media and Sovereignty,” and “Free Expression, Globalism, and the New Strategic Communication.” He was a fellow of the International Communication Association (ICA), a fellow of the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights & Programme in Comparative Media Law and Policy at the University of Oxford, and a member of the faculty of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, among other honors. 

Price joined Annenberg in 2004, and over the next sixteen years, he shaped the school’s engagement with the world in a lasting way. In 2006, he founded the Center for Global Communication Studies (CGCS), a center designed to bring together students, academics, lawyers, regulators, civil society representatives, and others working in the media sector the opportunity to evaluate critically and discuss comparative, global, and international communications issues. The center drew on law, political science, and international relations to explore public policy issues and how media and globalization were reshaping the nature of states and public life.  

Under Price’s visionary leadership, CGCS supported research and dialogue that engaged complex social, legal, and political questions across diverse global contexts. The Center conducted public opinion research in Sudan, provided technical assistance in Jordan and Thailand, and encouraged the intelligent development of media policies and new information technologies across a wide variety of settings, including Thailand and Somaliland. The Center also fostered the Stanhope Center for Communications Policy Research, located at the London School of Economics.

For years, CGCS partnered with the Programme in Comparative Media Law and Policy (PCMLP) at the University of Oxford’s Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, which Price himself co-founded in 1996, to host the Annenberg-Oxford Media Policy Summer Institute. The Institute brought together top early-career communications scholars, media lawyers and regulators, internet governance experts, and freedom of expression and human rights activists from countries around the world to discuss the effects of technology and policy from a global and multidisciplinary perspective. The Institute’s alumni, nurtured by Price’s guidance, have become leaders at top national and international nonprofits, advocacy organizations, government agencies, corporations, and academic institutions.

In 2008, PCMLP launched the Monroe E. Price Media Law Moot Court Competition, an annual international moot court competition named in “recognition of Price’s lifelong devotion and outstanding contribution to the development of media freedom and the rule of law.”

A Life Fully Lived

Monroe Edwin Price was born on August 18, 1938, in Vienna into a middle-class Jewish family, soon after the Anschluss annexation of Austria by Germany. Price and his immediate family escaped to New York City in 1939, then resettled in Macon, Georgia, and later, in Cincinnati, Ohio, where Price grew up and finished high school. 

At Yale University, Price discovered his interest for a world beyond the classroom. As an enterprising reporter for the Yale Daily News, he traveled to the United Kingdom, Moscow, and Cuba, where he interviewed Fidel Castro. 

After graduating in 1960, Price briefly worked for the American Heritage Publishing Company in New York City before joining Robert Wagner’s mayoral campaign. It was during law school, split between the University of Virginia Law School and Yale Law School, that Price became fascinated by Native American law and communications law, which inspired his work for the next six decades. His early advocacy work helped found California Indian Legal Services and the Native American Rights Fund and he went on to represent Cook Inlet Region, Inc., a Native Corporation established under the Alaska Native Claims Act.

Following his graduation from Yale Law, Price worked on the Warren Commission Report, served as a clerk to Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart and assistant to Secretary of Labor W. Willard Wirtz. While serving under Secretary Wirtz, he married art historian Aimée Brown Price.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Price was on the faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Law where he pursued both his interests. Price conducted extensive work on and scholarship about Native American law, served as the deputy director for California Indian Legal Services, and revived his interest in communications law — serving on Lyndon B. Johnson President’s Task Force on Communications Policy and as deputy director of the Sloan Commission on Cable Communications. In 1972, he established a Communications Law Program at UCLA. From 1976 to 1978, he was the court-appointed referee overseeing the school desegregation planning in Los Angeles.

In 1982, Price was named dean of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University in New York City, a role he held till 1991. There he created the Howard M. Squadron Program in Law, Media and Society and published extensively on First Amendment, cable, and satellite issues. He remained at Cardozo as the Joseph and Sadie Danciger Professor at Cardozo and joined Annenberg as an adjunct full professor, splitting his affiliation between Cardozo and Penn.

Until his retirement in 2020, Price published, taught, and advised extensively. He authored reports, organized conferences, and contributed to numerous international communication projects, commissions, and centers, including projects for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the John and Mary Markle Foundation. He lectured at his alma mater, Yale Law School, served as a visiting professor at Cornell University, was Chair of the Center for Communications and Media Studies at the Central European University, and remained an intellectual inspiration for so many.

Beyond the academy, Price and Aimée shared a deep love of art. Together, they established the Monroe E. Price and Aimée Brown Price Collection at the Yale University Art Gallery and in 2018, lent works to Annenberg for the exhibition, “Imagery, Narrative, Propaganda: Artists in the German Democratic Republic.”

Those who knew Price, remember him as a kind, open-hearted, and deeply curious person. He approached every person he met with genuine interest and warmth, and even brief encounters often grew into lasting connections. His generosity of spirit matched his intellectual seriousness, and both will be deeply missed.

Monroe Price leaves behind a body of work, and a generation of scholars, shaped by his belief that communication sits at the heart of how societies govern themselves and how the world holds together. While his loss is profound, his presence lives on in our conversations, our commitments, and the work we continue to do together.

The Annenberg community extends its deepest condolences to his wife, Aimée Brown Price, his children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren.

Members of our community are also sharing their reflections on the many ways Professor Price impacted their lives. If you would like to share a comment or a photo, please email news@asc.upenn.edu. Read the community’s memories here.