Robin Callender Smith

Personal Bio

Job Title: Professor of Media Law, Queen Mary University of London (QMUL)

Areas of Expertise:

Professor Robin Callender Smith is an international arbitrator, mediator and adjudicator. He works through his legal office, ARBITA, in the City of London.

As a media and privacy law barrister, he advises The Times, The Sunday Times, The Sun and the Sun on Sunday and has specialised in the technology, media and telecommunications (TMT) sectors for over 45 years.

He is Honorary Professor of Media Law at the Centre for Commercial Law Studies (CCLS). He is a four-time graduate from Queen Mary University of London (QMUL).

He is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Arbitration and a CEDR-qualified Mediator. He is an Adjudicator on the Panel appointed by the Society of Computers and the Law. Since 2013 he has been the Independent Adjudicator appointed by the Qatar Financial Centre Regulatory Authority (QFCRA) to determine issues within the authority’s Customer Dispute Resolution Scheme (CDRS) in respect of complaints made by customers and QFCRA-authorised firms.

He completed his LLB at QMUL in 1973 and was taught commercial law by the founder of CCLS, Sir Roy Goode QC. He completed his LLM in Computer and Communications Law with Distinction at CCLS in 2010 and his PhD – on celebrity privacy, the media and the law - in November 2014. His textbook Celebrity and Royal Privacy, the Media and the Law is published by Sweet and Maxwell.

He is an editor of Sweet & Maxwell’s Encyclopaedia of Data Protection and Privacy.

He has ten years’ experience as an Information Rights Judge dealing with Data Protection and Freedom of Information appeals from the Information Commissioner.