George Orwell said that “Freedom is the right to tell people what they do NOT want to hear”. Freedom of expression is a fundamental characteristic of being human, and a critical way that citizens can engage with each other and political authority: holding democratically elected politicians to account. Freedom of expression and press is a legally protected right. However, to an extent the freedom to express oneself (in words, writing or on social media) is not unlimited. The scope of the freedom is bounded by social conventions, for instance we should not cause harm or offence to other individuals, and also limited by laws for instance laws against hate speech. The question we would like to debate with you is whether the existing limitations (both those arising from social conventions and laws) on free expression need to be reviewed having regard to technological changes.
Neal Geach is one of Associate Deans at the Hertfordshire Law School in charge of teaching and learning. He is a trained barrister. He likes reading reports of legal decisions and thinking about how judges think, reason and come to their decisions. He has written book re-evaluating past cases where the judges were not unanimous in their decisions about the law. He assessed the arguments for and against the final decisions and questioned whether the law would have benefitted from following the dissenting opinion as opposed to that of the majority of judges, explaining the impact the dissenting judgment might have had on the law if it had decided the case and predict where the law of that field would subsequently be different.
Claudia Carr is a Senior Lecturer in law at the Hertfordshire Law School specialising in Medical Law and Ethics. Before joining the Law School in 2002 she worked in private practice specialising in criminal defence work and then medical negligence. Her primary research is the field of medical law focusing on legal and ethical questions relating to euthanasia, organ donation and legal problematics surrounding end of life including assisted dying and legalisation of assisted suicide. She is the author of several books and her PhD is concerned with informed consent in medical treatment for patients, including those with learning disability.
James Ressel is a Senior Lecturer at the Hertfordshire Law School. He is a qualified solicitor and practiced in a central London firm handling commercial litigation and insolvency. In 2005 he took up his first full time academic post at another university before joining the Hertfordshire Law School in 2018. His research interests centre on the relationship between law and politics, critical legal theory, free expression, and the relationship between law and language. He has argued that conventional theories of judicial interpretation of law are self-delusional, casting doubt on perception that the process of interpretation yields singular and objective legal decisions.