Dr Stefan Theil

Stefan is Assistant Professor in Public Law and a Fellow and Director of Studies at Sidney Sussex College. He completed his first degree in law at the University of Bayreuth (2011) in Germany. After brief stints working for a commercial law firm in Munich and for the Research Services of the German Bundestag in Berlin, Stefan earned an LL.M. from University College London (2013). Inspired to pursue a career in academia, he completed his doctoral work at the University of Cambridge (2018) and was the inaugural Research Fellow in Civil and Political Rights at Bonavero Institute, University of Oxford (2017-2021). You can follow Stefan on twitter and discover his papers on ResearchGate.

Research

Stefan’s research interests are broadly in the field of public and constitutional law, as well as human rights and legal methodology. His first book Towards the Environmental Minimum (Cambridge University Press, 2021) combines these interests, arguing for the recognition of a comprehensive framework that addresses the relationship between human rights and environmental harm. The argument is based on a unique case law dataset of the European Court of Human Rights, along with other regional human rights courts that is freely available for research and teaching purposes here. Stefan has previously consulted on legal challenges against breaches of air quality and emission targets in Europe, and the legal relevance of environmental harms more generally, notably under the Human Rights Act 1998.

The core research question of his work on free expression and protest is how the law should respond to the prevalence and abuse of private power, especially by structurally dominant platforms that operate online. This may require the law to revisit some of the principles and assumptions underlying conventional offline approaches to these rights, chiefly with respect to the scope for legitimate suppression of hate speech as well as the limits on the contractual autonomy of social media platforms with their users. Stefan has given interviews to various media outlets on questions of free expression and social media, including the BBC World Service and contributed to the on-going internal policy debates of social media platforms, notably on Facebook's Oversight Board Charter.

Beyond human rights, Stefan is generally interested in public and constitutional law, particularly as it operates in the United Kingdom, Germany and the European Union. He spearheaded research in Oxford on the prorogation of the UK Parliament and appeared on BBC News television and various radio outlets outlets to offer legal commentary on the proceedings before the Supreme Court in 2019. He writes and blogs frequently on legal developments, often drawing comparisons between legal systems and reflecting on deepening European integration.

Teaching

Stefan lectures on the Constitutional Law Paper and Human Rights Law Paper on the Law Tripos as well as the LLM courses on Advanced Public Law and Private Law and Human Rights. He supervises undergraduates in constitutional law and human rights, and PhD candidates in public law (including comparative), constitutional theory and legal methodology. In Oxford, Stefan lectured on the undergraduate Human Rights Law course and the BCL course Constitutional Principles of the EU.