Abhilash Nair 
Senior Lecturer in Internet Law | Aston University
Birmingham, UNITED KINGDOM
Abhilash Nair's principal area of research is in internet law, specifically the regulation of illegal content and internet pornography.
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Biography
Abhilash's principal area of research is within the area of internet law, specifically the regulation of illegal content and internet pornography. He is a world-leading expert on online child safety laws, and has advised various international and national bodies on regulating illegal content, online child sexual abuse material, and content-related cybercrime. He has published widely on aspects of internet law and regulation, and has been a regular speaker at international conferences and panels. Abhilash's recent research monograph titled 'The Regulation of Internet Pornography: Issues and Challenges' (Routledge) examines how the internet has necessitated a fundamental change in the regulation of pornography.
Abhilash holds a number of external appointments outside the University. He is the Editor in Chief of the European Journal of Law and Technology, one of the oldest open access law journals in Europe (formerly published as JILT). In addition, he serves as the Deputy Editor of the International Review of Law, Computers and Technology (Routledge), and an Associate Editor of the European Journal of Current Legal Issues. Abhilash is Secretary of the British and Irish Law, Education and Technology Association and has served as a member of the Technology Law and Practice Committee of the Law Society of Scotland. Abhilash is a member of the Evidence Working Group of the UK Council for Internet Safety (UKCIS) and a member of the UN-IGF Dynamic Coalition on Child Online Safety.
Areas of Expertise (5)
Platform Liability
Online Child Safety
Intenet Law and Regulation
Internet Pornorgraphy
Social Media
Education (1)
Aberystwyth University: LLM, Law 2002
Affiliations (5)
- Higher Education Academy : Fellow
- BILETA : Secretary
- Dynamic Coalition on Child Online Safety, United Nations Internet Governance Forum : Member
- UK Council for Internet Safety Evidence Working Group : Member
- Digital Policy Alliance : Academic Observer
Links (2)
Media Appearances (3)
Why you should think twice before posting photos of your children on social media
Glamour online
2020-07-24
“This is not just a parent responsibility. We need to move on from the parent-child dynamic being the main focus. Tech companies need to do more to keep children safe,” says Abhilash Nair, a Senior Lecturer in Internet Law at Ashton University and author of the book Regulation of Internet Pornography.
Policing porn and the new enforcement of moral standards that don’t exist
The Conversation online
2014-12-10
A legislative provision that has just come into force bans certain acts in online pornography produced in the UK, with the effect of bringing video-on-demand services into line with the British Board of Film Classification’s R18 standard that applies to physical films and DVDs sold in sex shops.
When a drawing or cartoon image can land you in jail
The Conversation online
2014-10-27
A cartoon can land you in court, as happened to a man recently convicted of possessing non-photographic images – cartoons, drawings – of a sexual nature featuring children.
Articles (3)
Law & Technology in Cars, Classrooms and Software
European Journal of Law and TechnologyAbhilash Nair
2019-11-29
In our first article, ‘Automated and Electric Vehicles Act 2018: An Evaluation in light of Proactive Law and Regulatory Disconnect’, Matthew Channon offers a thoughtful critique on the UK’s first insurance legislation for Connected and Automated Vehicles, the Automated and Electric Vehicles Act 2018 (AVEA 2018). Channon points out that the legislation essentially regulates self-driving vehicles that are currently not on public roads, which naturally means that it is speculative of future challenges. He argues that the law is likely to cause confusion due to some of its provisions being unclear. By taking a comparative approach in places, Channon proposes some solutions to some of the challenges in the AEVA 2018, taking into account what he argues as ‘the need to comply with regulatory connection and proactive law’.
'The most audacious and specific plan for knowledge, freedom and a better world’:Developing radical pathways to free, open journals
European Journal of Law and TechnologyPaul Maharg, Abhilash Nair, Catherine Easton
2019-06-20
Developments in digital technology have the potential to transform academic journal publishing. Academic research can now be disseminated directly to academic networks and the wider public, in theory bypassing the need for traditional journal publishing structures, conventional journal publishers and their associated industrial practices, cultures and cost structures. Cost is a particularly pressing issue for Higher Education (HE) globally. In the last few decades the strategies adopted by journal publishers have led to increasingly steep and unsustainable costs for our academic libraries, the centralisation of publishing power in the hands of a few conglomerates, and the corporatisation of metricised data that overwhelmingly profits corporate capital and that has largely been developed through the donated labour of academics, librarians and academic institutions. In this article we explore briefly the history of scholarly communications shifts, and the implications of digital publication for law libraries and law journals. We argue for a change of ownership in the means of production and analyse some of the obstacles to achieving this. We show how radical Open Access (OA) alternatives can work, based upon a case study of two existing OA journals, and we conclude with measures by which radical OA journals can be increased within the cultures of legal research.
Open legal journals in the space of flows: the future of legal journal publication
European Journal of Law and TechnologyPaul Maharg and Abhilash Nair
2016-12-30
Twenty years ago a new law journal appeared, called the Journal of Information, Law & Technology. Its acronym was rather unfortunate, but in every other way it was a breath of fresh air in legal journals. The title precisely described its contents. The comma between ‘Information’ and ‘Law’ was significant: this wasn’t another journal about a niche area of law, but a journal with truly interdisciplinary ambitions, where the information revolution, in the form of Information Science and Legal Informatics, would be given space and attention. The ampersand fused law and technology closer, too, giving notice of the journal’s views that the convergence of law and technology was already under way, and that that fusion, both a merging and an emerging, required careful analysis.
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