Matthew Collins was admitted as a Solicitor in 1994 before being called to the Victorian bar in 1999 and being appointed a silk in 2011. He holds a PhD in law from Melbourne University and is the author of Collins on Defamation (Oxford University Press, 2014), a leading text on the law of defamation in England and Wales, and all three editions of The Law of Defamation and the Internet (Oxford University Press, 2001, 2005, 2010), the standard international text on the application of principles of defamation law to online publications.