More on Professor Conor Gearty KC

Readers may recall my post marking Conor’s untimely passing (see here). The London School of Economics held a wonderful event last week commemorating Conor’s life and scholarship. I spoke on the ‘Public Law’ panel with Baroness Hale of Richmond and Professor Roger Masterman. Here are my speaking notes (to be published in due course by the European Human Rights Law review:

As you know, Conor and I share a family connection. He described us as second cousins once removed; I thought we were first cousins twice removed; though further research has clarified that we were in fact first cousins once removed (and would both have been hopeless conveyancers). For much of my life, Conor existed in fragments of conversations at family gatherings that referenced this mystical figure whizzing around North London on his bike, hurling broadsides at the establishment. Interestingly, reflective of the Ireland of the 1990s and early 2000s there was more pride taken in the fact that Conor wrote for the Tablet (a Catholic magazine) than in his lectureship at Cambridge or his professorships at King’s and the LSE. As it happened, the first time I saw him in person was at a seminar at the University of Cambridge during my graduate studies, where he came to launch some broadsides at the House of Lords for their decision in the Jackson case. The mystical figure took corporeal form as a whirling dervish who enjoyed nothing more than debate and discussion – and, later on, meting out career advice and encouragement.

When I knew I would be speaking here, I spent the past couple of weeks back in Conor’s work. It struck me, rereading him, that four inter-related themes run consistently through Conor’s writings on public law:

1. A deep scepticism of nostalgia
2. An impatience with complacency and a demand for forward motion
3. A commitment to civil liberties as the precondition for democratic life
4. A profound concern for the marginalised and the downtrodden

And I want to suggest that these four themes explain what otherwise looks like the most surprising development in his intellectual life: his embrace of legally enforceable human rights.

1. Suspicion of nostalgia

This theme is present from the very beginning. In Freedom under Thatcher, with Keith Ewing, Conor dismantled the comforting story that British judges had long stood as guardians of liberty through the common law. That story, they argued, was a façade for judicial accommodation — sometimes enthusiastic accommodation — of coercive state power.

This was a theme he returned to often, and with relish: the hypocrisy of those who would spend their days defending deference and their evenings in wood-panelled common rooms praising Coke, Bacon and Dicey over brandy.

His years at Cambridge in the 1980s — which he once described to me as “very white, very male and very conservative” — clearly gave him plenty of material. The Cambridge of today (the Cambridge that I know) is very different, but the nostalgia he attacked is still a powerful drug: in those wood-panelled common rooms, at kitchen tables, in cafés, and in country pubs across Britain.

On Fantasy Island is simply the late-career reprise of this theme. The attempt to banish European influence from British law, in the hope of returning to a glorious past, was for Conor a historical illusion. As he wrote in Principles of Human Rights Adjudication, the judicial record in the democratic era “does not inspire confidence in their capacity to serve as guardians of anything other than the values of the generation just passed.”

2. Anti-complacency and forward motion

Conor was constitutionally incapable of complacency. He was always in forward motion — intellectually and personally — and his scholarship reflects this restlessness.

An early example comes from an unlikely place: administrative law. In his review of Hogan and Morgan’s seminal Administrative Law in Ireland text, published in the Dublin University Law Journal, Conor attacked the “criteria employed for judicial review” on three grounds: they meant very little, they provided no rational basis for intervention, and they concealed subjective and politically partisan decision-making behind loose language. The ritual incantation of Wednesbury concealed more than it revealed.

The message was simple: judges needed to up their game.

The same message was directed at the rest of us in his Hamlyn Lectures, Can Human Rights Survive? Human rights, he insisted, are tools for human flourishing. Judicial enforcement is only a part of the story. The real work lies in “direct and sustained political action,” not “legal codification.”

In a characteristically beautiful passage, he wrote that the language of human rights “provides a link with the better parts of our past while guiding us towards the finer features of our future.” We must look to “long-term structures, not to immediate but merely transient gains.” Human rights are “means to an end” — a just society built on compassion.

Up your game, for fear that Conor would dismount his bike and interrogate you about what you thought you were doing.

3. Civil liberties as democratic infrastructure

For Conor, civil liberties were not optional extras. They were the infrastructure of democratic life.

Freedom of expression, association, religion, and assembly are what make political action possible. Where nostalgic common lawyers feared popular government as a threat to order and property, Conor was unambiguously democratic.

Common law principles were forged by Coke, Bacon, Dicey and their fellows in the eras before mass democracy. Who knows what Coke and Bacon would have thought of universal male suffrage (never mind the suffragettes), but Dicey’s hostility to the administrative state gives some clues. Is it any wonder, then, that a committed democrat like Conor, who saw the ballot box as a means of human betterment would look askance at the common law tradition, prefer to look forward to a better future achieved by political action and see civil liberties as a singularly significant means to that end?

As he wrote, civil liberties are “part of the essential fabric that goes into the making of our democratic tapestry.” Without them, there can be no robust debate, no forward motion, and no challenge to nostalgia or complacency.

4. Concern for the marginalised

Finally, and most importantly, there is Conor’s constant attention to whom he termed in Principles of Human Rights Adjudication those “rarely seen by the law.”

On Fantasy Island contains an extended treatment of how legally enforceable rights make visible those who are otherwise invisible in general legislation: the suspected terrorist, the immigrant, the sex offender, the young person from the wrong side of the tracks.

Conor appreciated that Parliament legislates in generalities but lives are lived in specifics. It is at the point where general law meets specific circumstance that interpretation — and humanity — matter most.

It is there that the principle of proportionality is most important: at the application of law to fact, legally enforceable human rights allow the invisible to become visible when most needed.

If there is any ‘master principle’ in Conor’s thinking, it is probably this one – no nostalgia, because the marginalized and downtrodden escaped the gaze of the common law; no complacency, for political programmes to help the marginalized and downtrodden are the way to show them the compassion they deserve; and strong civil liberties, to ensure that such programmes can be fought for and forged in the fire of public and political debate.

Explaining the “volte-face”

All of this helps explain the famous question he was once asked – and gleefully recounted –  when seeking to lead the Human Rights Centre at this august institution:

“Professor Gearty, as a well-known opponent of human rights, what makes you think you are qualified to lead a centre dedicated to their study?”

The Human Rights Act, in fact, answers many of the concerns that run through his work.

It is not nostalgic: it commits British judges to engage with Strasbourg and the European Convention on Human Rights as a living instrument. Even if the precise meaning of the ‘mirror principle’ is contested, that matters less than the fact that the Act forces a dialogue with continental contemporaries, rather than with the ghosts of the past.

It is not complacent: section 6 binds the executive, section 3 challenges the judiciary, and section 19 (and the broader parliamentary dialogue) engages Parliament itself. These institutional mechanisms impose rights-respecting duties on all of the organs of the state, compelling all of them to take human rights seriously.

It secures civil liberties in one place, setting out legally enforceable guarantees for expression, assembly, association and religion, ultimately securing the conditions for meaningful democratic debate about the community’s shared political future.

And through proportionality, it requires attention to the dignity of those at the margins.

The Act, in short, embodies the programme that runs through Conor’s writing.

Closing

What emerges from his work is almost a programme of political action:

• Reject nostalgia
• Reject complacency
• Protect civil liberties as the conditions for democratic life
• Ensure legally enforceable rights so that those on the margins have tools to fight back

That is not only a theory of public law. It is a moral posture toward society.

And it is, I think, the best way to understand Conor Gearty.

This content has been updated on February 13, 2026 at 13:22.