Patrons

Jeffrey practises full-time at Blackstone Chambers. From 2010-15 he was also the Founder-Director of the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law. Previously he combined practice with his Chair of Public Law at University College London  (UCL) (where he was twice Dean of the Law Faculty and a Vice Provost) .

He has authored numerous leading publications in the area of constitutional and administrative law, including, with Lord Woolf and others, De Smith’s Judicial Review.  He has received a number of honorary degrees and awards.

Jeffrey’s practice in public law includes litigation in the UK and abroad and advice on the constitutions, administrative justice laws and human rights issues in a number of countries across the world. From 2000-2011 he was the UK’s Member on the on the ‘Venice Commission’ (the Council of Europe’s Commission for Democracy through Law).  He has been a Non-Executive Director of the Office of Rail Regulation; Member of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution; Chair of the Council of the Institute for Philanthropy, and  Chair of the British Waterways Ombudsman Committee.  He is a Trustee of charities in the UK and abroad.

Helena Kennedy KC is one of the United Kingdom’s most distinguished lawyers.  She has practised at the Bar for 40 years in the field of criminal law and has conducted many of the leading cases in those years, including the Balcombe Street Siege, the Brighton bombing trial, the Guildford Four Appeal, the Michael Bettany Espionage case, the Jihadist fertiliser bomb plot, and the transatlantic bomb plot.  She has championed law reform for women, especially relating to sexual and domestic violence and developed the defence of Battered Women’s syndrome in the British courts.  She was also the leading voice for equal opportunities in the legal profession for women.  She authored a number of books on law reform, co-wrote the successful television series Blind Justice and became a well known broadcaster on law and ethics during the eighties, presenting the BBC’s Heart of the Matter.  She has chaired the British Council for 6 years and the UK Human Genetics Commission for 8 years. She has been a member of the House of Lords for 20 years, where she sat on the Joint Committee of Human Rights, and is now chair of the European Union Sub Committee.   She is Principal of Mansfield College, Oxford.

Professor Iyiola Solanke is a socio-legal scholar, with an expertise in EU and equality law. Iyiola is Chair of EU Law and Social Justice in the School of Law at the University of Leeds where she researches and teaches EU law, discrimination law, race and law, and Alternative Dispute Resolution.

Professor Solanke’s work is historical, empirical and socio-legal and her research interests include intersectional discrimination, critical race theory, and judicial diversity.

After completing her PhD at the London School of Economics, Iyiola joined the School of Law at the University of Leeds in 2010 and founded the Temple Women’s Forum North in 2013 to extend the outreach work of Inner and Middle Temples to legal professionals in the North and North East. In 2017 Iyiola was elected as an Academic Bencher of Inner Temple.

Iyiola is a Visiting Professor at Wake Forest University Law School and has been a Visiting Professor at Science Po, Grenoble in France. She has held Fellowships at the University of Michigan Law School (Ann Arbor, USA), the University of Sydney Law School (Sydney, Australia), McGill University Law School (Montreal, Canada) and at New Hall, Cambridge University. In 2018 Iyiola was a Fernand Braudel Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. In 2018 she was a Visiting Professor at Harvard School of Public Health, working with STRIPED on weight stigma.

Iyiola’s publications include Making Anti-Racial Discrimination Law and Discrimination as Stigma – A Theory of Anti-Discrimination Law, and she is an editor of Eutopialaw run by Matrix Chambers.

Previous research projects have focused on the impact of separate opinions on judicial authority, the Advocate General in the CJEU, social action and legal reform, cause lawyering, and black and migrant women in European welfare states.

Iyiola organises an international forum which investigates black experiences of policing in the EU, and the Black Female Professors Forum which promotes black women in academia. Iyiola also sits on the General Council of the International Society for Public Law.