Can a Scholar be a Good Activist?

Pavlos Eleftheriadis, Professor of Public Law at the University of Oxford, discusses the role of scholars and academia in human rights activism.

Professor Eleftheriadis was educated at the University of Athens (BA, 1990) and the University of Cambridge (LLM, 1991, PhD, 1995). He teaches European Union law, constitutional law and jurisprudence. He is the author of Legal Rights (Oxford University Press, 2008) and many other essays in public law, jurisprudence and European Union law.

He has been a Fellow of Mansfield College, Oxford since 2003. He has been a visiting professor of law at Columbia Law School. He is a barrister in England and Wales and practises before the English courts in various areas of public law and human rights from Francis Taylor Building in the Temple. Some of his recent cases involved challenging the Brexit process on constitutional grounds, including a challenge to the legitimacy of the EU referendum on account of the violation of electoral law by the ‘Leave’ campaigns.

Dr Marie Tidball, Founding Director and Coordinator of the Oxford University Disability Law and Policy Project, Oxford City Councillor and Executive Board Member for Supporting Local Communities, will serve as a discussant. She is a Research Associate at the Centre for Criminology and a Knowledge Exchange fellow at The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities Centre (TORCH). Her academic interests concern the intersection between disability and society with a specific focus on the criminal justice system. In addition to her academic pursuits Marie has extensive experience of project managing award-wining campaigns aimed at driving disability inclusion within academia, civil society, and government. Prior to her academic career Marie worked as a broadcast journalist for Channel 4 News.