Democracy of Expression: Positive Free Speech

About the panel

Andrew Kenyon is Professor of Law at the Centre for Media and Communications Law in the Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne and an Investigator in the multi-institution ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. He researches in comparative media law, including defamation, privacy, free speech, data regulation and democracy. As well as legal doctrine, this work draws on a wide range of media studies research. Among other work, he has conducted multi-year doctrinal and empirical research into defamation law, litigation and news production practices in Australia, the UK, USA, Malaysia and Singapore, and extensive research on comparative approaches to free speech.

Ioanna Tourkochoriti is a legal scholar working on issues of human rights, constitutional law and jurisprudence from a comparative perspective. Before joining the Law Faculty at NUI Galway she held for eight years research and Faculty appointments at Harvard University. She has published widely and with leading presses and journals from all around the world on freedom of expression, freedom of religion, harm to self, human dignity, postmodernism and the law, as well as on issues of discrimination on the grounds of religion and disability. She is the author of “Freedom of Expression: The Revolutionary Roots of American and French Legal Thought” (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

Jacob Rowbottom is a Fellow of University College, Oxford, and Professor of Law in the Faculty of Law, University of Oxford. He holds a BA in Jurisprudence from Oxford and an LLM from New York University School of Law. He was previously a University Lecturer in Law and Fellow of King’s College at the University of Cambridge. He is a qualified barrister and previously worked on the staff of an election campaign for the US Senate. His research interests include media law, freedom of expression and the legal regulation of the democratic process. He is the author of Democracy Distorted (2010) and Media Law.

Mathias Hong is Professor of Public Law at Hochschule Kehl, University of Applied Sciences for Public Administration. From 2008 to 2016 he was a research assistant at the University of Freiburg. From 2005 to 2008, he was a Law Clerk at the German Federal Constitutional Court. His research interests include human rights & constitutional law. He is an associate editor at Verfassungsblog covering freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and public sphere issues.

Charles Girard is an Associate Professor in Legal Philosophy at Lyon 3. He writes on democracy, fundamental rights and freedom of expression, and leads the EGALIBEX research program on freedom of expression and equal participation. He is the author of Délibérer entre égaux. Enquête sur l’idéal démocratique (Vrin, 2019).

Adrienne Stone is Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor and Director of the Centre for Comparative Constitutional Studies at Melbourne Law School. She researches in the areas of constitutional law and constitutional theory with particular attention to freedom of expression. She is a Kathleen Fitzpatrick Australian Laureate Fellow and her Laureate Program on Comparative Constitutional Law assembles a research team to investigate challenges to liberal democratic constitutionalism. She has published widely in international and Australian journals. She is the President of the International Association of Constitutional Law and is an elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and Australian Academy of Law

^{Photo by Juliana Romão on Unsplash}