Professor Adrienne Stone delivers Chan Sek Keong Professorial Lecture in Public Law

On 6 February 2025, Professor Adrienne Stone delivered a lecture titled “The Constitutional Role of Universities” at the Wee Chong Jin Moot Court on Bukit Timah Campus.

Universities have recently been at the centre of heated controversy and debate that raises fundamental questions about the nature of universities and of their place within a democracy. Against that backdrop, Professor Stone brought the insights of constitutional law—a discipline squarely focused on the nature and distribution of power and on the place of institutions within democracies—to the fore. Those insights advance an understanding of universities as institutions of democratic government by virtue of the role they play in supporting civil society and enabling democratic government through teachings and research.

This perspective raises questions as to the purpose, nature and extent of the university’s core commitments to academic freedom and open inquiry and the role of academics in protecting those norms. This lecture advanced a conception of a university as a central institution in democratic government and explored the rights and responsibilities that attend that role.

About Professor Adrienne Stone

Professor Adrienne Stone is a Melbourne Laureate Professor and Director of the Centre for Comparative Constitutional Studies at Melbourne Law School. She researches in the areas of constitutional law and theory in Australia and globally, freedom of expression and academic freedom. She has published widely on these topics. She teaches constitutional law, comparative constitutional law, and freedom of speech across the JD and MLM programmes. As Kathleen Fitzpatrick Australian Laureate Fellow (2016-2021), she established and directed the Laureate Program in Comparative Constitutional Law which developed a significant research capacity in comparative constitutional law at Melbourne Law School.

Among her recent publications, she is the author (with Carolyn Evans) of Open Minds: Academic Freedom and Freedom of Speech (2021). With Cheryl Saunders AO, she is editor of the Oxford Handbook on the Australian Constitution (2018) and with Frederick Schauer, she is editor of the Oxford Handbook on Freedom of Speech (2021). She is a founding General Editor of Comparative Constitutional Studies, the immediate past President of the International Association of Constitutional Law, a former Vice President of the Australian Association of Constitutional law, an elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, and the Australian Academy of Law.