Featured Experts: Dr. Laurent Pech, The School of Law at Middlesex University London
Professor Laurent Pech is a regular contributor to national and international media.
Fields of expertise: EU Constitutional Law, EU Internal Market Law, EU Competition Law, and EU Fundamental Rights Law.
Contact info: L.Pech@mdx.ac.uk
EUCAnet invited Laurent Pech to share some tips and advice about his outreach expertise:
“When answering questions during a live interview, I tend to follow a 3-step default template: (i) provide a brief and direct answer to the question (e.g. yes, this is not compatible with the rule of law); (ii) offer a brief justification to support your answer (e.g. the rule of law means …) and (iii) offer a concrete example to support the answer (e.g. this is how the Court of Justice has understood and applied the rule of law in this case …). In my experience, the most challenging aspect of live interviews is to able to explain usually complex information in usually less than a minute. The only way I have found to cope with this demanding format in a situation where the law is complex – which is more often the case than not – is to accept that it is virtually impossible to be entirely (legally) accurate but one can always add qualifications when answering follow up questions.”
“Engaging with media is not only essentially to communicate one’s expertise to a wide and general audience, I have also found it a stimulating intellectual exercise as it forces you to translate and condense your scholarly insight and tends to make you a better communicator. In a world where disinformation spread by pseudo-experts seems to become increasingly prevalent, not engaging with the media also means making it easier for individuals lacking relevant expertise to fill the vacuum with the aim of shaping public narrative for reasons other than the public interest.”
For more information about the media appearances and contributions of our academic experts, please visit the following page.
