Christoph Weilhartner works as a university assistant (pre doc) at the Department of Constitutional and Administrative Law of the University of Vienna’s Faculty of Law. There, he is writing his doctoral thesis under the supervision of Prof. Michael Lysander Fremuth. Aside from his teaching and publishing activities at the University of Vienna, he conducts research at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Fundamental and Human Rights on his doctoral thesis and other topics in international and constitutional law. 

Christoph has studied law both at the Univeristy of Vienna and Université Panthéon-Assas (Paris II). Additionally, he holds a Bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of Vienna. In the course of his studies, he was awarded multiple merit-based scholarships from the University of Vienna and from the Scholarship Foundation of the Hörer der Rechte. 

He has gained professional experience in previous positions as a student assistant at the Department of Constitutional and Administrative Law as well as a project assistant at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Fundamental and Human Rights. Outside academia, he completed corporate internships in the United States and Canada, worked for the Austrian Federal Competition Authority in Vienna and the Außenwirtschaft Austria in Athens.

In his doctoral project, Christoph examines the sanctioning of blasphemy through state-imposed blasphemy laws from a human rights perspective. At the core of it is a case law analysis of the ECtHR’s relevant jurisprudence regarding the tension between freedom of religion and expression in the context of blasphemy.