Book Launch: Free Speech Theory: A Radical Restatement — Paul Wragg

The Bonavero Discussion Group is thrilled to host the launch of Paul Wragg's second monograph, Free Speech Theory: A Radical Restatement (Bloomsbury/Hart, 2025). 

As described by Bloomsbury, "Free Speech Theory challenges contemporary thought on this issue. It champions free speech not for its contribution to epistemic advance or informed democratic participation, but as a product of individuality, located in a system of freedom from state control. This has wide-ranging implications for rights-claims directed against private actors concerning online, workplace, and public-interest based forms of speech.

This innovative, rigorously researched, and comprehensive restatement of free speech principle is both topical and important. It has significance for policy makers, practitioners, and commentators around the world."

Paul Wragg is Professor of Media Law at the University of Leeds, a director at Hacked Off, and co-host of the Media Law Podcast. He was, previously, an original code committee member at IMPRESS and helped draft the first code of conduct and accompanying guidance. Free Speech Theory: A Radical Restatement is his second monograph. His first, A Free and Regulated Press: Defending Coercive Independent Press Regulation was also published by Hart, in 2020. His research interests focus upon the theory and practice of free speech, press regulation, and privacy.

Dr Eliza Bechtold is the Programmes Manager and a Research Fellow at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights.  She researches in the area of freedom of expression at the national, regional, and international levels and is particularly interested in the regulation of extreme speech in the digital age and how free speech frameworks can function to undermine democratic norms and institutions.  

Prior to entering academia, Dr Bechtold practiced law in the United States for nearly a decade, working as a litigation associate for law firms, including DLA Piper LLP, and serving as the Legal Director of the ACLU of New Mexico.  While working for the ACLU of New Mexico, she litigated human rights cases before federal and state courts and engaged in advocacy efforts throughout the state in relation to LGBTQ rights, immigrants' rights, and reproductive freedom.

Gavin Phillipson is Professor of Law at the University of Bristol, UK. His research covers aspects of comparative constitutional law and European, UK and comparative human rights law, in particular, the ‘horizontal effect’ of constitutional rights, free speech, public protest, privacy and anti-terrorism and the interface of these fields with constitutional and political theory. He has published widely in these fields in top law journals in the UK, Australia, Canada and the US and is co-author of the leading text Media Freedom under the UK Human Rights Act (2006, OUP), with Fenwick. His work has been cited in judgments by the UK High Court, Court of Appeal, former House of Lords and Supreme Court in the UK, by the Canadian Supreme Court, New Zealand Court of Appeal and by the Media Lawyer’s Association in their intervention to the European Court of Human Rights in Hannover v Germany (no 2) (2012).

Dr Patrick O'Brien is a public lawyer with research interests in judicial studies, law and democracy, and constitutional theory. He completed his LLB at Trinity College Dublin, and went on to do a BCL and a DPhil on judicial review and democracy at St. John's College Oxford. He held posts at University College London and the London School of Economics prior to appointment at Oxford Brookes in 2017. He is an honorary research associate at The Constitution Unit, UCL. Patrick is the co-author of The Politics of Judicial Independence in the UK's Changing Constitution (CUP 2015) and the co-editor of Leading Works in Public Law (Routledge, forthcoming 2021). He has appeared before committees of the Oireachtas and the UK Parliament to give evidence on the judicial role and judicial appointments.

Marija Jovanović is a human rights lawyer with a research interest in modern slavery and human trafficking, business and human rights, labour rights, migration and refugee law, and regional human rights regimes. She holds DPhil, MPhil, and Magister Juris degrees from the University of Oxford, and a law degree from Serbia.

Marija is currently a Research Fellow in Business and Human Rights at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights, and a Co-Investigator on behalf of the Bonavero Institute to the AHRC-funded Modern Slavery and Human Rights Policy and Evidence Centre. She also holds a Senior Lectureship at the Essex Law School. She previously held a Research Fellowship at the Centre for International Law, the National University of Singapore, and a Lectureship in Law in Serbia.

She is the author of State Responsibility for ‘Modern Slavery’ in Human Rights Law (Oxford University Press, 2023) and her recent work has focused on the compatibility of the UK’s immigration legislation with its human rights obligations towards victims of modern slavery, the experiences of modern slavery survivors in the UK prisons, and the issue of child criminal exploitation in the UK. Marija is currently working on the programme of research that focuses on labour exploitation including the ways in which states approach this issue both domestically and through supply chain regulation.