Speakers
Jeremy Kessler
Jeremy K. Kessler is an Associate Professor of Law, is a legal historian whose scholarship focuses on First Amendment law, administrative law, and constitutional law generally. He joined the Columbia Law School faculty in 2015 and is co-director of Columbia University’s 20th Century Politics and Society Workshop and Columbia Law School’s Legal History Workshop. He also serves on the ABA’s Committee on the History of Administrative Law. Kessler’s forthcoming book, Conscription and Constitutional Change in Twentieth Century America (Harvard), explores how the contested development of the military draft transformed the relationship between civil liberties law and the American administrative state.
His articles on First Amendment law, administrative law, constitutional theory, and American legal history have appeared in the Harvard Law Review, the Columbia Law Review, the University of Chicago Law Review, and the Texas Law Review, among other publications.
Kessler received his J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was a Legal History Fellow and the executive editor of the Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities. He earned an M.Phil. in the history and philosophy of science from the University of Cambridge and a B.A. from Yale College, summa cum laude.
Jeremy K. Kessler is a member of the Presidential Scholars in Society and Neuroscience Advisory Committee.
Ron Krotoszynski
Ronald Krotoszynski is the John S. Stone Chairholder of Law and director of faculty research in University of Alabama School of Law. Professor Krotoszynski earned his B.A. and M.A. from Emory University and J.D. and LL.M. from Duke University where he was articles editor for the Duke Law Journal and selected for Order of the Coif. He clerked for the Honorable Frank M. Johnson, Jr, of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit and was an associate with Covington & Burling, D.C. Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Alabama School of Law, Professor Krotoszynski served on the law faculty at Washington and Lee University and, prior to that, on the law faculty of the Indiana University School of Law-Indianapolis. He also has taught as a visiting professor at the Washington and Lee University School of Law, the Marshall-Wythe School of Law at the College of William and Mary, at the Florida State University College of Law, and at Brooklyn Law School. Krotoszynski has held appointments as a visiting scholar in residence at the University of Washington-Seattle School of Law, the Seattle University School of Law, and the Lewis and Clark School of Law.
His research focuses on administrative law, constitutional law, First Amendment law and telecommunications law. Professor Krotosynski can speak on topics such as free speech and law as it relates to politics.
Emily Laidlaw
Emily Laidlaw is a Canada Research Chair in Cybersecurity Law and Associate Professor. She researches in the areas of technology regulation, cybersecurity and human rights, with a focus on platform regulation, online harms, privacy, freedom of expression and corporate social responsibility. She is author of the book Regulating Speech in Cyberspace: Gatekeepers, Human Rights and Corporate Responsibility (Cambridge University Press, 2015).
Prior to joining the University of Calgary in 2014, Dr. Laidlaw spent almost ten years in the United Kingdom where she completed her LLM and PhD at the London School of Economics and Political Science and held a tenure-track lectureship with the University of East Anglia Law School. Before undertaking postgraduate studies, Emily practised for several years in Canada as a litigator, and she is currently serving as Ethics Advisor to Calgary’s City Council.
As a scholar, she actively contributes to law reform and other advisory work to government and other bodies. She co-chaired the expert advisory panel on online safety appointed by the Government of Canada to advise on next steps for the development of legislation to address online harms. As a result of the impact of her work outside the academy, Dr. Laidlaw was recognized as a Peak Scholar in 2018.
Dr. Laidlaw engages widely in public discussions in her field, delighting in conversations with her students, with the public at events, whether at the library or online panels, conferences, judicial education and testimony before government.
Dr. Laidlaw is a network director of the Canadian Network on Information and Security and a member of the Institute for Security, Privacy and Information Assurance.
Helen Fenwick
Helen Fenwick is a Professor of Human Rights Law in Durham University and Associate Fellow in the Institute of Advanced Study. She is a Human Rights Consultant to Doughty Street Chambers in London, one of a group of Chambers specialising in human rights litigation.
Her research interest lies in the field of civil liberties and human rights. Within that field her main interests are in counter-terrorist law and policy, media freedom of expression (in particular contempt law, obscenity law and privacy law), public protest, and the influence of the European Convention on Human Rights under the Human Rights Act. Her publications concentrate on those areas. Her research focuses on counter-terrorist measures, media freedom of expression and judicial reasoning under the Human Rights Act.
She is author of Civil Rights: New Labour, Freedom and the Human Rights Act (2000, Longmans/Pearson), and of Fenwick on Civil Liberties and Human Rights (latest edn 2017, Routledge); she is General Editor and an author for Judicial Review.
She has also published articles on human rights matters in Modern Law Review, Public Law, Cambridge Law Journal, Common Market Law Review, European Public Law, Criminal Law Review, the International Review of Victimology, the Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law, and the Journal of Criminal Law.
Andreas Wiebe
Andreas Wiebe graduated from the University of Hannover in 1987 and received the LL.M. degree at the University of Virginia (U.S.A.) in 1988. Having obtained the doctoral degree in 1991 with a comparative work on the protection of computer programmes in the U.S. and Germany he worked as an assistant at the Institute of Legal Informatics at the University of Hannover. In 2001 his habilitation was accepted based on a work on electronic contracting. From 2002 to 2009 he was the head of the Department of Information Law and Intellectual Property Law at Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration. Besides several guest professorships he was a Visiting Professor at Stanford Law School from January to June 2008 and at the University of Nanjing, China, in October 2012. Since May 2009 he is a professor of competition law, intellectual property law and media law at the University of Göttingen, Germany.
Main areas of research are information and communication technology law, copyright and intellectual property law, and unfair competition law. He participated in several nationally and EU funded research projects, in recent years with a special focus on data protection and copyright law.
Prof. Wiebe ist head of „Forschungsverein Infolaw“ in Vienna. He is co-organisor of the Austrian ICT Law Day and the Competition Law Forum, both annual events in Vienna.
Prof. Wiebe is on the scientific board of several IT and media law journals in Germany and other European countries. He is an author of several German and English legal articles and books and co-editor of handbooks. He was Vice President of the German computer law association (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Recht und Informatik, DGRI e.V.) from 2005 to 2011.
Paul Wragg
Paul Wragg is a Professor of Media Law at the University of Leeds. He read law at Durham, where he graduated, first, with an LLB Law (first class) and, later, a PhD. His expertise lies in the related fields of free speech rights and privacy law. He has been at Leeds since 2009, having taught previously at the University of Birmingham and Durham University. He is an associate academic fellow at the Honourable Society of Inner Temple, and has been a visiting fellow at the Universities of Sydney and Melbourne. His work has been published in a wide range of journals, nationally and internationally, from generalist titles, such as Public Law and Cambridge Law Journal, to specialist titles, such as Industrial Law Journal and Journal of Media Law, from Sydney Law Review to Ohio State Law Journal.
His monograph on the compatibility of compulsory press regulation with press freedom entitled A Free and Regulated Press: Defending Coercive Independent Regulation was published by Hart in May, 2020.
He was previously editor-in-chief of Communications Law (2016-2019), he is a board member of the campaign group Hacked Off, which supports victims of press abuse. He also sit on the code committee of IMPRESS, the UK’s only officially recognised press regulator.
He has a number of research interests that coalesce around his primary interest in free speech theory. He has been fascinated, for a long time, with the dynamic interplay between press freedom and privacy rights in the UK and European Court of Human Rights case law and, more recently, on the apparent dichotomy between press freedom and (meaningful) press regulation. He has given presentations in the UK and around the world, including the USA, Australia, India, Japan, and much of continental Europe.
Peter Coe
Peter Coe is an Associate Professor in Law at the University of Birmingham. Prior to this I was a Lecturer in Law, and then an Associate Professor in Law, at the University of Reading, where he served as the Deputy Research Division Leader, the School of Law’s Research Communications Lead, and the Co-Chair of the Law, Justice and Society Research Group. He has also held a Senior Lectureship in Law at Aston University, where he undertook several academic management and administrative positions relating to research and teaching. He holds an LLB and LLM from the University of Northampton and was awarded a PhD by the University of Leeds. He is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
Dr Coe’s research interests fall within the broad field of Media Law. A primary theme within his research agenda is the changing nature of journalism, and what this means, both normatively and theoretically, for free speech, press freedom and regulation. He is particularly interested in how the development of the internet, and the ascendancy of social media platforms, have altered the press industry and our media and communication ecology more broadly.
Dr Coe’s work in this area has led to him working with Impress, which is the Press Recognition Panel approved regulator of the UK press, and the Information Commissioner’s Office, on the development of their respective journalism codes.
His work has been published in leading journals such as Legal Studies, the University of Melbourne’s Media & Arts Law Review, and the Journal of Business Law, amongst others, and his monograph, Media Freedom in the Age Citizen Journalism, was published by Edward Elgar Publishing in 2021. In addition, he regularly writes for practitioner and media outlets, and he is often invited to speak to the media, at international conferences, and to give guest lectures to academics, non-academics and policy makers.
Sarah Eskens
Sarah Eskens is a legal researcher interested in questions related to online platforms and mediated communication. Her current work focuses on two topics: the developing EU legal framework on disinformation, and the obligations of messaging apps under the Digital Services Act.
She works as an Assistant Professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Before that, she obtained her research master’s in Information Law (University of Amsterdam, 2016) and wrote a dissertation on the fundamental rights implications of personalised communication by news media (University of Amsterdam, 2021).
In her work, she looks at, among others, the Digital Services Act (‘DSA’), Political Advertising Regulation, European Media Freedom Act (‘EMFA’), and General Data Protection Regulation (‘GDPR’).
Next to her research, she is involved in teaching at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She coordinates the master’s specialisation in International Technology Law. She also coordinates and teaches a master’s course on European data protection law, and she teaches platform regulation and media law in another master’s course. Finally, she coordinates the internships and master’s theses for students in the International Technology Law specialisation.
Domingos Soares Farinho
Domingos Soares Farinho is an Assistant Professor at the University of Lisbon Faculty of Law. He is a member of the Institute of Legal and Political Sciences (ICJP) of the Faculty of Law of the University of Lisbon. Principal Investigator at the ICJP Public Law Research Center (CIDP) where he develops research and consultancy in the areas of Fundamental Rights, with a special focus on Privacy and Data Protection, Freedom of Expression and Regulation of Online Platforms; Administrative Law and governance of the Public Sector; and regulation of the Third Sector.
For the last 10 years he has developed an interest for a Public Law approach to the digital worlds with a special interest in Fundamental Rights, Regulatory Law and Theory of Law in the digital field. This is now where he does the bulk of his research, although he still dedicates some time to Third Sector Law, especially public regulation, in the Portuguese legal system.
Founding member of the Lisbon Digital Rights and Freedoms of CIDP/ICJP/FDUL. Member of LxLTG – Lisbon Legal Theory Group of CIDP/ICJP/FDUL.
He regularly participates in courses and conferences dedicated to his preferred research topics: Fundamental Rights in a digital context and Third Sector regulatory law.
Extensive work published in the areas of Public Law, Third Sector Law and Governance.
András Koltay
András Koltay is a lawyer, professor at the University of Public Service and the Pázmány Péter Catholic University. He obtained his LL.M. (Master of Law) degree from University College London in 2007, prior to that he also studied at the International Institute of Human Rights in Strasbourg. He received his PhD from the Faculty of Law at the Pázmány University in 2008. From 2010 to 2019 he worked as a member of the Media Council, from 2018 to 2021 he held the position of rector of the National University of Public Service. His main research interests are in the areas of freedom of expression, media law and personal rights.
He published his monograph entitled A szólásszabadság alapvonalai [The Foundations of Freedom of Speech] (Századvég) in 2009, his books Freedom of Speech, Religions and the State (Századvég) and New Media and Freedom of Expression (Wolters Kluwer) were published in 2016 and 2019 respectively. In addition, he has more than 400 scientific publications in Hungarian and in English. He is editor-in-chief of Iustum Aequum Salutare a law journal, as well as In Medias Res an academic journal on freedom of press and media regulation. Between 2010 and 2019, he was a member of the Media Council of the NMHH. Since 2016 he is a member of the Public Body of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and since 2017 a member of the Legal and Ethics Committee of the Hungarian Paralympic Committee.
Zsolt Ződi
Zsolt Ződi is a senior reserach fellow at the Institute of the Information Society, Ludovika University of Public Service. He graduated as a lawyer, and worked as a publishing professional in different positions in legal publishing and IT companies until 2011. In 2012 he earned a PhD in legal informatics. Since then, he was associate professor in University of Miskolc, Eötvös Loránd University Budapest, and Corvinus University Budapest teaching legal theory and infocommunication law. At this period he led computational legal lingusitics, and other legal text-mining projects, and wrote several articles on the role of precedents in the Hungarian courts. Since his appointment to the Institute, his main research field is the regulation of information society, including internet platforms and AI, and use of LegalTech. His book entitled Platform law was published last year. Zsolt is the author of three books, and more than 100 articles.
Bernát Török
Bernát Török is associate professor of constitutional law, and director of the Institute of the Information Society at the Ludovika University of Public Service (Budapest). He worked as legal expert at the Hungarian media authority for 7 years, then he was chief counselor at the Constitutional Court of Hungary between 2010 and 2018. In 2016-17, he was visiting scholar at Yale Law School. He is author of the book ‘To Speak Freely in a Democracy’, and co-editor of several volumes on free speech, media law and the regulation of new technologies. His research interests include freedom of speech, and fundamental rights in the information society. From July 1, 2025 he will be holding the title of UNESCO Chair on digital platforms for learning societies.
