The team
Dr Lawrence McNamara
Lawrence was Reader & Director of Postgraduate Research at the University of Reading's School of law, and ESRC/AHRC Research Fellow.
His broader research interests lie primarily in the legal regulation of speech, especially as it relates to the media. He is interested in defamation and in racial & religious hate speech, including comparative and historical aspects of these fields. He also researches aspects of sport and law. He is the author of Reputation and Defamation (OUP 2007) which was shortlisted for the 2008 Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship.
Lawrence was awarded the ESRC/AHRC Fellowship in Ideas and Beliefs in 2009 and heads the Law, Terrorism and the Right to Know research project which runs from 2009-12.
Lawrence's recent publications include:
- "A Matter of Honour" (2009) 38(2) Index on Censorship 80-88
- "Anti-Terrorism Laws and the Australian Media" (2009) Gazette of Law & Journalism http://www.glj.com.au (subscriber access only).
- "Counter-Terrorism Laws: How They Affect Media Freedom and News Reporting" (2009) 6(1) Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 27-45.
- "Closure, Caution and the Question of Chilling: How Have Australian Counter-Terrorism Laws Affected the Media?" (2009) 14 Media & Arts Law Review 1-30.
- "Counter-Terrorism Laws and the Media: National Security and the Control of Information" (Spring 2009) 5(3) Security Challenges 95-115
Conference papers in the area of the research project:
- "Media Freedom and the Right to Know: The Effects of Counter-Terrorism Laws and Cultures", for series 'Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Communication and Governance', Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, University of Oxford, 30 November 2009.
- "Counter-terrorism laws: How they Affect Media freedom and News Reporting", Journalism Testing Legal Boundaries: Media Laws and Reporting of Arab News, Arab Media Centre, University of Westminster, 20 June 2008
- "Democracy, Doubt and Fear: Media Freedom and Counter-terrorism Laws in Australia and the UK", SLSA Annual Conference, Manchester University, April 2008
- "Demons and Democracy: Counter-Terrorism Laws and the Legitimacy of Limits on Media Freedom", Dept of Politics (seminar series), University of Queensland, 3 August 2007; Faculty of Law (seminar series), University of New South Wales, 5 Sept 2007
Mr Sam McIntosh
Sam McIntosh was a teaching fellow and research assistant at the University of Reading's School of Law.
Sam came to the University of Reading in 2008 having worked at three of the most highly regarded human rights firms in the country. He is supporting Dr McNamara on the LTRK project as a research assistant.
He began his training in the criminal defence department at Imran Khan & Partners and went on to finish his training and work in the civil litigation departments at Bhatt Murphy Solicitors and Hickman & Rose. Sam worked primarily on cases involving civil actions against the police and prison authorities, inquests into deaths in custody or at the hands of the State, and judicial review. In practice, Sam worked on civil and criminal cases with clients suspected of terror offences. At Hickman & Rose, Sam also assisted in representing the interests of the family of Azelle Rodney, an unarmed man who was shot dead by police in 2005. The inquest has been postponed indefinitely as some of the core evidence relating to why the police targeted Mr Rodney is of a sensitive nature. The matter is not terror related, but was a direct influence on government attempts to introduce legislation which would exclude families and the public from inquests where the government considers it necessary for evidence to be heard in secret.
