In this policy brief, the Guardian’s Director of Editorial Legal Services Gillian Phillips presents her perspective on the post-Leveson media law landscape, arguing that journalists are being submerged in a complex network of more and more law and regulation, which threatens not only to restrict but to criminalize journalists’ conduct.

The capture of regulators by industry interests was once viewed as the dominant paradigm for failures of regulation. Recently, the financial crisis has re-awoken interest in ‘regulatory capture’ — a term used by the Governor of the Bank of England Sir Mervyn King, among others. 

Paul Wragg of the University of Leeds assesses the impact of Lord Justice Leveson’s recommendations for press regulation on ordinary members of the public.

With reference to cases such as the treatment of the transgender primary school teacher Lucy Meadows by the Daily Mail, he argues that any future regulator will struggle to achieve any meaningful change to the ‘cultural indifference to individual privacy and dignity’ shown by sections of the press, given Leveson’s failure to clearly define, yet insistence on preserving, press partisanship.