About The Author

James H. Barron

JAMES H. BARRON is a journalist, attorney, and founding advisory board member of the New England Center for Investigative Reporting. A creator of the award-winning International Boston Initiative and Atlantic Rim Network, he has taught courses at MIT, led study groups at Harvard’s Institute of Politics, and lectured at universities in Paris and Tokyo.

Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Barron attended the Commonwealth School in Boston and graduated with honors from the University of California at Berkeley. He received an M.A. degree and completed course work toward his Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He received an M.S degree at Boston University in communications and a law degree from Suffolk University, while covering national and international politics for local news media including the Boston Phoenix. His articles appeared in such publications as The Washington Post, Washington Monthly, The Christian Science Monitor, The Boston Globe, The New Republic, Newsday and The European.  He was the first book review editor for Campaigns & Elections.

He chaired the Massachusetts Bar Association’s committee dealing with issues of news media and judiciary conflict and advised Governor Michael Dukakis’s  commission on reporter shield laws. While director of the Massachusetts Legislative Commission on Privacy, responsible for drafting fair information practices, he wrote a frequently cited law review article, “Warren and Brandeis, ‘The Right to Privacy,’ 4 Harv. L. Rev.193 (1890): Demystifying a Landmark Citation,” which challenged the historic origins of the Right of Privacy. The American Bar Association Journal  commented: “Barron must have been forewarned that he was not taking on just any old law review article…There’s a lot of scholarship and hard digging into facts crammed into Barron’s article.” Leading First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams described it as “absolutely magnificent.”

As an attorney and communications consultant with an international practice, Barron created the International Boston initiative, a private-public partnership designed to make the city and region more globally connected. It developed into the Atlantic Rim Network, an NGO that viewed dynamic metropolitan regions, anchored by cities, as the primary building blocks of the new global economy. A Boston Globe editorial wrote: “ Barron, an international lawyer…is working to mold the concept of the Atlantic Rim into something far more solid.” Among the programs he organized were “The First Transatlantic Telemedicine Summit (1997)” and “Bringing Foreign News Home: A Symposium on the Decline of International News Coverage and Strategies to Reverse the Trend (1999).”

Barron lives in Massachusetts with his wife, award-winning journalist and long-time WCVB-TV Director of Editorials, Marjorie Arons-Barron.