We started with three academic members: Professor Philippe Sands, University College London; and Professor James Crawford, Cambridge, both specialising in international law; and a third, Professor Conor Gearty, then Kings College London, now of London School of Economics, concentrating on domestic public law/human rights. One of our first actions was to conduct an open competition for new academic members. This resulted in our being joined by a third international lawyer, Professor Christine Chinkin, LSE, and three additional domestic lawyers: Professor Andrew Choo of the University of Warwick; Professor Gillian Morris of Brunel University; and Professor Aileen McColgan of King's. In 2004 we were joined by Professor Takis Tridimas, Sir John Lubbock Professor of Banking Law and Head of the International Financial Law Unit of the Centre for Commercial Law Studies, Queen Mary College, London, who is a specialist in EU law. One of the latest recruits to our academic group is international lawyer and arbitration specialist Zachary Douglas, who lectures at University College London. Johnathon Marks Associate Professor of Bioethics, Humanities and Law at Pennsylvania State University and Director, Intercollege Bioethics Program at the main campus, University Park, is the latest recruit to the academic group.
The expertise of our academic colleagues now ranges across the whole of the legal spectrum, from international and EU law on the one hand, to employment, public law, human rights, and criminal on the other.
The relationship that Matrix seeks to have with its academic members is innovative in a number of ways. Such members are fully integrated, handled by the practice management teams in exactly the same way as other members. They are available to be instructed, and to pursue cases on which they are instructed in the normal way. Our academic members play a full role in the organisational life of Matrix, sitting on Committees as full voting members.
Our academic members are not 'door tenants' but nor are they full-time barristers, and, importantly, neither do they aspire to be. They are academics for whom practice is an additional aspect of their professional lives, a dimension which adds much of benefit to their academic career, but which in no way supplants it.
The kind of practice developed by our academic colleagues varies according to their specialism. Our academic international law practitioners are involved in a field of work in which the academic/practitioner distinction has historically been less marked than in other areas. Our domestic law academics are often required to provide written opinions on areas of law on which they are the national or international specialists. They bring work to Matrix in the ordinary way but are also brought into cases at the appellate level - the House of Lords, for example - where their particular skill adds academic depth to the Matrix team. In these various ways, our core value of a better relationship between academe and the bar is being realised.
