Dr. Thorsten Held

Dr. Thorsten Held studied Law at the University of Hamburg. He was an academic consultant at the Hans Bredow Institute from 1998 through May 2011, since 2004 he has also belonged, as a lawyer licensed in Hamburg, to the “Büro für informationsrechtliche Expertise” (i.e., Specialist Bureau for Information Law). Since June 2011 he has worked as a judge in Hamburg and resigned from the Institute.

One emphasis of his work at the Institute was the question as to how the prescriptions for public communications under constitutional law can be also fulfilled under changed social and technical circumstances. In this context, he dealt with, among other things, the tasks of public broadcasting. In connection with his dissertation, he investigated the legal questions of online offerings from the broadcasting institutions. A further area of his work is new regulatory concepts for broadcasting and the Internet internally and abroad. He had a particular interest in legal aspects of broadcasting finance and of protection of young people, regulatory questions in the area of telecommunication as well as the tension between communicative freedoms and protection of the personality.