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How do liberal democracies respond to the fact of multiple speakers in public discourse? Previous approaches to media regulation were predicated upon a few speakers-many readers/listeners/viewers m...

This article interrogates restrictions on speaking events in universities created both by recent student-led efforts at ‘no-platforming’ and by Part 5 of the Counter-terrorism and Security Act 2015 which placed aspects of the government’s existing Prevent strategy on a statutory basis for the first time. The statutory Prevent duty as it applies in universities includes, under the accompanying Guidance, curbing or monitoring such events on the basis that they could have an impact in drawing persons into terrorism. This article will place the combined impact of Part 5 and student-led curbs on campus speech in context by juxtaposing a range of pre-existing restrictions with the various free speech duties of universities. Focusing on speaking events, it sets out to evaluate the results of this chequered situation in terms of the current state of free speech and academic freedom in universities. It finds potential violations of established free speech norms due to the impact of pre-emptive strikes against some campus-linked speech articulating non-mainstream viewpoints. But it also argues that not all such speech has a strong foundation within such norms.

Protocol 15 inserts a new recital into the Preamble of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) which affirms the primacy of national authorities in securing the effective realization of Convention rights. The article discusses the context for Protocol 15, notably the Brighton Declaration, and the democratic principles it engages. A selective retreat from substantive supranational review towards systemic supranational review in political expression cases may be occurring. The article questions the emerging pattern by which newer and transitional democracies remain subject to strict levels of supranational scrutiny, whilst their more established counterparts look set to be the main beneficiaries.

"You have to ask yourselves, Why is it that foreign law would be relevant to what an American judge does when he interprets interprets, not writes 1 mean, the Founders used a lot of foreign law. If you read the Federalist Papers, it's full of discussions of the Swiss system, German system. It's full ofthat. It is very useful in devising a constitution. But why is it useful in interpreting one?" Justice Scalia, US Supreme Court (speaking extra-judicially at American University, Washington College of Law, Washington DC).1

Ever since the enactment of the Contempt of Court Act 198 1, concern has been expressed’ about the use of orders under sections 4 and 11 restricting the media’s ability to report court proceedings in accordance with the principle of open justice.* However, the absence of any empirical survey of these orders has hampered a proper evaluation of their worth. This article seeks to elucidate the operation of reporting restrictions at Crown Court level by presenting and analysing the results of a survey of nine Crown Courts during the period 1982-89. The findings are prefaced by an exposition of the legal framework.

The decision of a unanimous House of Lords in X Ltd v Morgan-Grampian Ltd and Others ' will probably be remembered as the occasion when the ability of the media to protect their sources under section 10 of the Contempt of Court Act 1981 was seriously eroded. Such an account would, however, fail to record the efforts which were made to give substance to the general legislative policy behind s 10 namely, ensuring the flow of information into the public domain via the media (ie by protecting media sources). It will be argued that, whilst certain criticisms may be made of the decision to order disclosure, the case ultimately raises doubts about the adequacy of the statutory formula itself.