Assistant Professor Levent Emre Özgüç and Sustainability Platform Gender Equality Expert Arca Begüm Bayır Presented Paper at SLSA Annual Conference 2025

Assistant Prof. Levent Emre Özgüç from the Faculty of Law at Özyeğin University presented a paper at the 2025 Annual Conference of the Socio-Legal Studies Association (SLSA), held at the University of Liverpool from 15 to 17 April. In his presentation titled “‘#ArrestThem’: Social Media’s Influence on the Criminal Process in the Turkish Justice System”, Dr. Özgüç employed case analyses to examine the relationship between public pressure, governmental influence, and judicial decisions. He highlighted the challenges these dynamics pose to judicial impartiality and proposed reforms aimed at mitigating the impact of public sentiment on judicial integrity.

Additionally, Dr. Özgüç’s article titled “The Turkish Constitutional Court’s Struggle with the European Human Rights Law: An Evaluation of the Court’s Case-Law on the Crime of ‘Defamation against the President’ in Light of the Jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights” was published in The International Journal of Human Rights in March 2025.

Arca Begüm Bayır, Gender Equality Expert at the Özyeğin University Sustainability Platform, also presented a paper at the same conference. In her paper entitled “Memory in Law: A Feminist Perspective on Repealed Turkish Penal Code Article 438 and the Constitutional Court's Justifications Regarding Repealed Article 438,” SLSA member Bayır emphasized that although feminist critiques of law have persisted throughout history, current legal systems still fail to adequately address the structural problems faced by women.

Focusing on the now-repealed Article 438 of the Turkish Penal Code, Bayır’s analysis explored the relationship between law and society through the lens of legal memory, highlighting the exclusion of women’s experiences from legal reasoning and judicial justifications. The study contributes to the questioning of the gender-blind nature of law and underlines the importance of developing a more inclusive legal perspective grounded in gender equality.