Emord graduated from the University of Illinois in 1982 with a double major in History and Political Science. He was an Edmund J. James Scholar at that university. Emord chaired an Americans for Reagan chapter at the University of Illinois and served on internships with the National Journalism Center in Washington, D.C. and the Free Congress Research and Education Foundation while in undergraduate school. He graduated from DePaul University College of Law in 1985 with a J.D. While at DePaul he was the Editor-in-Chief of a private journal on law and government entitled Cogitations.

Emord began his legal career as an attorney in the Mass Media Bureau of the Federal Communications Commission in 1985 during the Reagan Administration. He thereafter worked for Washington, D.C. law firms Fisher, Wayland, Cooper and Leader and Wiley, Rein & Fielding and established himself as a litigator in FCC comparative hearings. In 1992, he served as a Vice President at the Washington, D.C. think tank, the Cato Institute. Re-entering private practice, he formed his own law firm, Emord & Associates, in 1994, beginning with a stable of 10 clients that became over 450 by 2009. From 1994 to the present he has represented clients principally before the Food and Drug Administration, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Drug Enforcement Administration.

On February 4, 1998, Emord testified before the House Government Oversight and Reform Subcommittee of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce against FDA’s denial of access to experimental cancer treatments for an 8 year old client, Zachary McConnell, who suffered from a glioblastoma. Eventually FDA reversed its decision and allowed the boy to receive the experimental drugs.

Emord is rated “AV,” preeminent in the law (highest possible legal rating in both legal ability and ethical standards) by the Martindale-Hubbell organization. His career is marked by a series of victories over the FDA and by defense of individual rights against government regulation. He was awarded the Cancer Control Society’s Humanitarian Award in 2007 for writing “critically acclaimed First Amendment books and professional papers” and for tearing “down walls of censorship.” Congressman Ron Paul has referred to Emord as “a hero of the health freedom revolution” and has said “all freedom-loving Americans are in [his] debt.” Emord has written several pieces of legislation for Congressman Paul designed to restore constitutional government, including the Health Freedom Act; the Congressional Responsibility and Accountability Act; and the Freedom of Health Speech Act.

In 2009, Emord began working with jurists and public interest groups in Europe and Canada to develop legal strategies for attacking restrictions on the right to communicate health information in those countries. Increasingly Emord’s work on defense of the right to communicate truthful nutrient-disease information has become international. In 2009 the Walter Reed publishing company together with Nutraingredients.com invited Emord to Brussels to explain how European Food Safety Authority restrictions on the right to communicate nutrient-disease information could be challenged before the European Court of Human Rights. Emord’s December 10, 2009, speech was widely reported upon in the European and American trade press.

Major accomplishments

On behalf of his clients Durk Pearson, Sandy Shaw, the American Preventive Medical Association, and Citizens for Health, Emord defeated the Food and Drug Administration in the landmark First Amendment case Pearson v. Shalala. He went on to defeat the FDA in federal court an additional six times, five on First Amendment grounds, making him the only attorney in American history to have achieved that many victories (seven) over the agency.

Emord believes that the Constitution should be interpreted in a manner consistent with the founding principles underlying it. In his first book, Freedom, Technology, and the First Amendment (1991), Emord argued that the First Amendment was intended to deny the federal government any power whatsoever over speech and press. He argued for “static barriers” that would ensure that the First Amendment achieved that objective over time, and he argued for “dynamic definitions” that would cause new media to receive the same protection against government as the print media. He called for elimination of Federal Communications Commission content and structural regulations and implementation of a private property rights system in place of government control of the airwaves. In a 1991 Policy Analysis for the Cato Institute entitled Contrived Distinctions: The Doctrine of Commercial Speech in First Amendment Jurisprudence, Emord challenged the argument for distinguishing commercial from political speech and affording the former less protection than the latter. He called for equal protection for commercial and political speech against government regulation.

Emord is the author of four books:

• Freedom, Technology and the First Amendment (1991)
• The Ultimate Price (2007)
• The Rise of Tyranny (2008)
• Global Censorship of Health Information (2010).

In The Rise of Tyranny, he argues that the United States has been transformed from a constitutional republic into a bureaucratic oligarchy because over three-quarters of all federal laws are not created by the elected representatives of the people but by the unelected heads of federal bureaucratic agencies. He urges adoption of Congressman Paul’s Congressional Responsibility and Accountability Act which would prohibit agency regulations from being implemented until Congress enacted them as legislation, thereby returning the law making function to Congress and re-establishing the separation of powers. In Global Censorship of Health Information, Emord explains that legal prohibitions on the right to communicate truthful nutrient-disease information in the market are present in every country that regulates drugs and argues for elimination of those prohibitions in favor of speech freedom and fully informed consumer choice.