Rachael Craufurd Smith is a Reader at the University of Edinburgh specialising in media and European Union law.  She studied at Hertford College, Oxford, and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, before completing her doctorate at the European University Institute in Florence on comparative media law.  Rachael previously worked as a lawyer in private practice, then at the BBC, advising on the impact of EU law on the corporation, and as an academic at the University of Oxford (Trinity, Corpus Christi and St. John’s Colleges). She has written widely on media freedom and regulation and has argued for the continuing importance of co-ordinated intervention at domestic and EU levels to protect and promote media plurality. She recently published, together with E. Barendt, J. Bosland and L. Hitchens, Media Law: Text Cases and Materials (Pearson, 2014). She is a co-founding editor of the Journal of Media Law (Hart), worked closely with the Open Society Foundation on their major study on media ownership transparency, and led the Edinburgh team on the FP7 EU-funded Mediadem project examining freedom and independence of the press in fourteen European countries.