Gavin Phillipson has held a chair in law at the University of Durham since January 2007. He is a qualified solicitor and has been a senior fellow at the University of Melbourne. His research interests lie in the fields of European and UK human-rights law, especially freedom of expression, and the judicial role in protecting human rights. He has written widely in these areas in top UK, US and Canadian journals and published three books, including, with Helen Fenwick, Media Freedom under the Human Rights Act (2006, OUP). A fourth book - Debating Hate Speech (with Eric Heinze, Hart) - is forthcoming in 2015.

He has given papers by invitation at numerous conferences and seminars overseas, including in Washington, Duke and George Washington Law Schools and the universities of Toronto, Hong Kong, Monash, Singapore, Melbourne and UNSW. His scholarship has been cited in, and influenced judgements of, the High Court, Court of Appeal and House of Lords and the New Zealand Court of Appeal and used by the Media Lawyer’s Association in their third-party intervention to the European Court of Human Rights in the case of Von Hannover v Germany (no 2) (2012).

Recent Parliamentary reports including by the Joint Committee on Privacy and Injunctions (2012), Joint Committee on Human Rights (re the Defamation Bill Dec 2012) and the Constitutional and Political Reform Committee (2013) have discussed his evidence to them in detail as did the recent Law Commission Report on Hate Crime (2014). He has made frequent contributions to national and international press, radio and TV, including the Telegraph, Sunday Times, Guardian, BBC Newsnight, Radio 4, Sky News, Al Jazeera, Christian Science Monitor, Boston’s Chronicle of Higher Education, Norway’s Al Posten, and Denmark’s Politikein.