Professor Conor Gearty KC, RIP

Readers will forgive a slightly more personal post.

This morning, I learned of the sudden death of Professor Conor Gearty KC.

Amongst a very great many other things, Conor was my first cousin, once removed. We first met — after many family mentions of this brilliant but slightly mysterious figure who blazed a trail in England — when I was a doctoral student at Cambridge. Conor came to give a talk to the Centre for Public Law on the House of Lords decision in Jackson. Conor did not write a paper, or indeed speak from any prepared notes that I could identify but nonetheless engaged a roomful of sceptical academics for well more than the anticipated running time.

I know he ran over because I had to take off for a dinner engagement (arriving late for dinner at Cambridge being a big no-no). I was subsequently upbraided by my supervisor, Professor John Allison, whom Conor had collared at the post-talk reception, saying something along the lines of “I’m told you are supervising my relative. Where is he? Was he that ‘Daly-looking’ fellow who sprinted out of the seminar room?” On John’s strict instructions, I contacted Conor, went down to London to have lunch at the LSE (where Conor seemed to know the biographies of everyone from the head of school to the cafeteria staff) and thus began a long familial friendship.

On every occasion over the last 20 years when I have had a career decision to make, I spoke to Conor about it. He told me when I was talking nonsense, when others were talking nonsense, when I was underselling myself and when I was overselling myself. He was funny, charming and brilliant in equal measure. And with the patience of a saint, as befits someone who took religion very seriously.

Most poignantly of all, he leaves his wife Aoife Nolan and two young children, having remarried relatively late in life after the untimely death of his first wife. His passing came as a real shock, as he was always in the rudest of health. One of our last in-person conversations was in West Cork a couple of years ago, where he alternated between playing with his children and swimming in the sea. The last time I saw him was in Dublin, rounding off a day of celebration of the career of Professor Caroline Fennell (a transformative figure in the law faculty of my alma mater, University College Cork) with profound insight and good humour.

The world is a poorer and heavier place today for his passing. There are beautiful tributes from the LSE and Matrix Chambers, where he was a barrister and even the Irish President,

His website remains active and has links to many little pieces that reveal why he was so loved by so many. One piece that just came out, “Eight tips for surviving (and enjoying!) academic writing” gives a flavour of the man, professor and public intellectual:

These four early writing tips – concision; sensitivity to audience; structure; and the importance of having something to say, however unpopular – have stayed with me all my working life.

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These two fields – civil liberties and terrorism – have been very productive for me, with each bringing an historical dimension, an attention to what is happening on the ground, that is probably the style that recurs most often in what I do. (Later this year the Cambridge Law Journal will be publishing my ‘Suffragettes and the law’, an article that has been in my head and on bits of paper for years, bringing together both civil liberties and ‘terrorism’ in a single piece.) But what about human rights? I am a professor of human rights law after all. Where does my supposed central specialism fit in the story I am telling?

To answer that I need here to suggest a fifth factor in my career: grabbing chances that present themselves. How did I come to get a book published by a commercial house like Faber & Faber so early in my career and without an agent? Answer: my best friend from school and university in Ireland worked for Channel Four and through him I got an idea for a documentary on terrorism (with a book deal thrown in) adopted by a famous independent producer (Peter Montagnon, creator of Kenneth Clarke’s Civilisation) and then commissioned by the Channel. I’ve been writing on and off for the London Review of Books for 30 years – my first piece only happened because I was spotted by a friend of the editor doing a talk in Cambridge on a wintry wet night to a small audience and having travelled up from London to do it: in other words, an irrational career move that nevertheless produced an opportunity to write for a wonderful paper. In my thirties I did many programmes for the BBC on both Radios 3 and 4, including a series in the weekly 9:05 am slot (‘Common Ground’), bringing two people together of wildly different views and seeing on what, if anything, they could agree. This only happened because an academic had pulled out of an interval talk on Radio 3 and I willingly agreed to take their place. So, when a new post as Rausing Director of the Centre for the Study of Human Rights came up, naturally I thought I was well suited – despite my then position on the idea, neatly encapsulated in the first question at interview: ‘Given your well-known objection to the whole idea of human rights, Professor Gearty, why have you applied for this post?’

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A sixth thought about my writing career emerges from my human rights story: it’s okay to change your mind if you feel you have to. As Keynes famously did not say: ‘When the facts change, I change my mind – what do you do, sir?’

Amongst the treasure trove on Conor’s website are a podcast he did earlier this year with Julian Harris. It is vintage Conor: at times whimsical and casual but always deeply insightful and, above all, abundantly clear, reflecting here on his life and career to date: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twCcd7MvE7s If you have the time, you should listen in.

This content has been updated on September 12, 2025 at 20:08.