Dr Jessica Lake

Biography

Dr Jessica Lake is a Lecturer in Law at Swinburne University. She is a comparative and interdisciplinary scholar, researching in the areas of legal history, gender and media law (privacy and defamation). She has an LLB (Hons), BA (Hons) and PhD from the University of Melbourne.

In 2016, her PhD thesis was published as a book by Yale University Press titled The Face that Launched a Thousand Lawsuits: The American Women Who Forged a Right to Privacy. It argued that women first forged a 'right to privacy' in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by bringing cases to prevent and prohibit the unauthorised publication of their photographic and cinematic images. In 2018, her book was shortlisted for for the W.K Hancock Prize (for the best first book in any field of history) by the Australian Historical Association, and won Best Overall Publication in the Faculty of Business and Law at Swinburne University. Jessica has also published her work widely in journals, edited books and newspapers, and presented at conferences, in Australia and the United States.

In 2016-2017, Jessica held the Karl Loewenstein Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Political Science and Jurisprudence at Amherst College (USA).

She is also a qualified lawyer, and practised for many years in the area of media and entertainment law and commercial litigation.

Jessica is qualified to supervise PhDs as an Associate and welcomes students interested in one or more of the following areas: legal history, media law (such as defamation, privacy, obscenity, contempt), technology and law, and gender studies.