Amnesty International’s Julia Hall Named Spring 2025 Pozen Visiting Professor

Julia Hall, an accomplished human rights lawyer with three decades of international research, advocacy, and litigation experience, will be the Spring 2025 Pozen Visiting Professor. 

Hall (full bio) will teach an undergraduate course, “Contemporary Challenges to Freedom of Expression,” drawn from her ongoing research on freedom of expression, focusing on how that freedom has been dramatically constrained in recent years, especially in Europe and North America.

The course will cover, among other issues:

• The different definitions of freedom of expression enshrined in international human rights law, US law and in European regional and domestic contexts.
• How freedom of expression goes beyond being able to “say what you want.”
• The concept of a “chilling effect,” where clampdowns on expression make people less likely to express themselves going forward.
• The use of national security and counterterrorism laws to restrict expression.
• The influence on freedom of expression of tech companies, the media, and universities. 

Students will engage with these subjects via case studies of:

• Contemporary protest movements (including racial justice, climate justice, anti-austerity, and Palestinian solidarity movements)
• Online censorship
• Lawsuits against journalists and media workers
• The “cancellation” of voices within the academy
• The weaponization of the freedom of expression by far right groups.

“We’re living through a period where freedom of expression is really under attack, particularly in states in the Global North, where many countries hold themselves out as human rights standard-bearers,” Hall says. “This course is a chance to look at these clampdowns and ask where they’ve come from and how they’re playing out, which will mean looking at legislation, key court cases, street protests, and what’s happening online. It will be a tour of how space for freedom of expression is continuously shrinking."

For much of Hall’s career, her focus was the human rights dimension of counter-terrorism. From 2009 to 2024, she was Amnesty International’s official expert on this subject in Europe. It was through Amnesty that she became, in 2019, one of the lead lawyers in the organization advocating for the human rights of Julian Assange (another case to be discussed in her course). 

Before working at Amnesty, Hall spent 13 years at Human Rights Watch, working as senior legal counsel in the organization’s Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism program.

These experiences with counter-terrorism, Hall explains, relate directly to her Pozen course. “Governments often weaponize counter-terrorism laws to criminalize speech on certain subjects, including by labeling that speech as ‘incitement.’ So that’s something else we’ll be looking at in the course: what ‘incitement’ really means, and how governments can abuse the concept.”

“I’m eager to share my research and experiences on this subject with students,” Hall says. “But I’m also looking forward to learning from them about their perspectives on expression, and their experiences of these broader developments.”

In addition to her course, Hall will also give a public talk on her research. 

The Pozen Visiting Professorship brings distinguished human rights scholars and practitioners to UChicago for one quarter to teach a seminar and offer a public lecture. This advances the Pozen Center’s goal of bringing the theory and practice of human rights into productive and creative conversation. The professorship is made possible by a gift from Richard and Ann Pozen.

Pre-registration for Spring Quarter courses opens on February 24.

Related article: In its consideration of the role of universities in protecting (or failing to protect) free expression, Hall’s class overlaps with a just-released Pozen Center Report on academic freedom.