Nick is a public lawyer with a particular interest in immigration and asylum, prisoners, community care and mental health (including capacity), education, equality law, and inquests.
Nick was originally an academic, being the first researcher to the Centre of Advanced Litigation at Nottingham Law School. He completed a Ph.D in civil justice there in 1995. He then took on a post-doctoral research fellowship sponsored by Irwin Mitchell solicitors, and qualified as a solicitor in 1998. In 2001 he moved to the Bar, transferring to Matrix in 2007.
Nick has been recommended by the Directories since 2004 (when he was just three years call). The 2011/12 Directories say that he is a “forceful advocate” who has won over many an instructing solicitor with his “eye for detail”; “he is very thorough and gets to grip with complex cases extremely well”; a “particularly strong and robust advocate, and one of the best in the field”; he is “able to identify solutions that would often not occur to others.”
Nick’s main strength is in the breadth of his experience. Recent cases range from pure immigration (FA (Iraq) [2011] UKSC 22: Tribunal jurisdiction over subsidiary protection claims) to immigration detention (the Yarl’s Wood litigation (Suppiah [2011] EWHC 2) and the multi-claimant challenge to the Secretary of State’s policy on bail addresses: Razai & others [2010] EWHC 3151); an equality challenge to the Legal Services Commission civil bid round (Hereward & Foster v LSC [2010] EWHC 3370); the key prison case of James, Lee & Wells [2009] UKHL 22; and the case concerned with whether school exclusion proceedings engage Article 6 of the ECHR (V v Tom Hood School [2009] EWHC 369).
Nick is also the editor of Education, Public Law and the Individual, and the deputy editor of the UK Human Rights Reports.