Wednesday 8 October 2025
Location: Small Hall, Main Building (4th floor), Fabianinkatu 33 & Online
There is a limited number of seats available to the event. Please register via the link below.
Schedule (subject to change)
9:00–9:15 Opening ceremony
9:15–10:20 Leo Mechelin Keynote Lecture
10:30–11:45 Panel discussion: Academic Freedom and the Rule of Law
11:45–13:00 Networking coffee and light snacks in the lobby
Registration for the event is now open and required for both in-person and online participation. Attendance is free. All registered online participants will receive a link to the live stream upon registration.
Each year, in connection with Rule of Law Day, the Rule of Law Centre and the Leo Mechelin Foundation award the Leo Mechelin Medal to a distinguished advocate of the rule of law.
The 2025 Leo Mechelin Keynote Lecturer will be Academician, Professor Emeritus Martti Koskenniemi. Previous keynote lecturers include Professor Emeritus Kaarlo Tuori (2022), Professor and Nobel Laureate James A. Robinson (2023), and Professor Alina Mungiu-Pippidi (2024).
Koskenniemi has served as Professor of International Law at the University of Helsinki since 1994 and as Director of the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights, which he founded, since 1997. He is one of the world’s leading scholars of the rules-based international order and an influential public intellectual.
He received his doctorate at the University of Turku in 1989. He has held visiting or part-time professorships at the University of Cambridge, the London School of Economics, the University of Melbourne and Sorbonne University in Paris. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has honorary doctorates from several universities. He has also served as a member of the UN International Law Commission. He was Academy Professor in 2005–2009 and 2013–2017. He received the Finnish Science Award in 2021 and he was granted the honorary title of Academician of Science in 2023.
Academic freedom is more than freedom of expression. It is intrinsic to the sustainability of the rule of law. It is institutionalised through disciplinary autonomy, peer review, and university self-governance. Outside interference can threaten the quality of knowledge and its contribution to public life.
Academic freedom, relevance, and impact are mutually dependent: research cannot be relevant without freedom, impact cannot follow from irrelevant work, and freedom without responsibility risks irrelevance.
Tensions arise when freedom, relevance, and impact are placed in opposition: too much freedom can detach research from societal needs, while an excessive focus on immediate impact risks reducing scholarship to policy responsiveness and undermining theoretical or critical work.
The panel discussion will examine how academic freedom is interconnected with the rule of law. It will consider the pressures that threaten autonomy, and highlight how legal and institutional frameworks can protect knowledge production while balancing freedom, relevance, and impact.
Panellists will be announced soon.