Jessica Lake

Jessica Lake is a Senior Lecturer and Australian Research Council DECRA fellow at the University of Melbourne Law School. She specialises in media law, legal history, and feminist legal theory. Her first book, The Face that Launched a Thousand Lawsuits: The American women who forged a right to privacy, was published with Yale University Press in 2016. She is currently writing a book on the gendered history of defamation law, for Stanford University Press.

Jessica Lake reviews ‘Suing for Silence: Sexual violence and defamation law’ by Mandi Gray

July 2024, no. 466 • 20 June 2024

I began Mandi Gray’s book while waiting for the judgment to be handed down in Bruce Lehrmann’s defamation case against Network Ten and journalist Lisa Wilkinson. I had tuned into the live-streamed trial months earlier, along with 124,444 others, to hear Brittany Higgins being interrogated about her recollections of that fateful night in Parliament House. Gray’s argument – that some men wer ... (read more)

Jessica Lake reviews 'The Fight for Privacy: Protecting dignity, identity and love in the digital age' by Danielle Keats Citron

November 2022, no. 448 • 25 October 2022

Privacy crises come in waves, usually spurred by public panics over new technologies and their exploitation by those in power. In the 1890s, it was the evils of ‘instantaneous photography and newspaper enterprise’ that pushed Harvard jurists Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis to famously advocate for a new common law (‘judge made’) right to privacy. In the mid-twentieth century, the availabi ... (read more)