David Erdos

David Erdos is a legal researcher and political scientist who principally examines privacy and data protection law.  

David's Data Protection and the Open Society (DPOS) project examines tensions between data protection/privacy, freedom of expression and freedom of information.  It is particularly concerned with the emerging law and practice of data protection as this relates to the following issues:

• Similarities and differences in how data protection law is being interpreted and applied by national regulatory agencies, national courts and tribunals, the European Commission, the European Court of Human Rights and the European Court of Justice,
• The potential tension between data protection law and practice and freedom of expression and information, not only in the United Kingdom but also in other advanced industrialized nations (elsewhere in the EU),
• How these tensions are being practically resolved by different social actors including, in particular, academic institutions (especially in the context of the emergence of ethical review), professional journalists and citizen bloggers.

In the Hilary Term of 2009, and prior to the formal start of DPOS, David organized a seminar series “Human Investigation and Privacy in a Regulatory Age” at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies to begin the process of mapping out some of these issues. Participants within this series included academic lawyers, barristers, social scientists, medical researchers and professional journalists.  More recently in June 2012 David convened an Oxford Privacy Information Law and Society (OxPILS) Conference on "The "Right to be Forgotten" and Beyond:  Data Protection and Freedom of Expression in the Age of Web 2.0" which recieved funding from a Joint Programme between the European Union and the Council of Europe (http://www.csls.ox.ac.uk/oxpilsconference).  Full information on the DPOS project is available through http://www.csls.ox.ac.uk/dataprotection. A text-only version is also available at www.csls.ox.ac.uk/dp.php

Alongside this emerging work on privacy and data protection, most of David's published work to date focuses on explaining Bill of Rights outcomes in the Westminster world (the UK, Canada, New Zealand and Australia).  This work looks both at the immediate triggers behind Bill of Rights adoption and on possible longer-term relationships between such projects and neoliberalism, social heterogeneity and 'postmaterialization'.  His monograph on this topic, Delegating Rights Protection, was published by Oxford University Press in the autumn of 2010.

David has presented his research at a number of academic conferences not only in the UK but also in North America and Australasia.  Recent papers given include those at the 2011 Northumbria Information Rights conference, 2010 annual conferences of the Political Science Association (UK) and the Society of Legal Scholars (SLS), 2009 Biannual Conference of the Australian Bar Association, 2008 annual conference of the New Zealand Political Science Association, 2007 annual conferences of the Socio-Legal Studies Association (UK), Political Studies Association (UK), American Political Science Association, Canadian Political Science Association and 2006 annual conference of the Australasian Political Science Association

Core research interests

• Data Protection Laws and Practices
• Freedom of Information
• Freedom of Expression
• Bills of Rights
• Constitutional development of the UK and other Westminster/Commonwealth countries

Core teaching and supervision interests

• Information Law and Practice (including Data Protection and FOI)
• Comparative constitutional design
• Nature and future of UK constitution (and other Westminster/Commonwealth countries)
• Judicialization (especially in human rights field)
• Political science approaches to studying the law

Previous positions

ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Politics, University of York