The Neill Law Lecture

This Lecture is a major occasion for law in All Souls College and in Oxford. The Lecture was established in 1997 –alongside the Neill Concert– to honour Patrick Neill, Lord Neill of Bladen. In 2012, it became an annual event.

Lord Neill played a leading part in the development of All Souls through the second half of the 20th century, as Fellow from 1950 to 1977 and then as Warden, 1977-1995, before serving the University as Vice-Chancellor, 1985-1989.

• 1997 - Harry Kenneth Woolf: ‘Judicial Review: The Tensions between the Executive & the Judiciary’, Chapter 7 in Lord Woolf, The Pursuit of Justice (Christopher Campbell-Holt ed, OUP 2008) 131–148
   
• 1999 - Lord Hoffmann: Europe and the question of sovereignty
   
• 2002 - Lord Steyn: ‘The Case for a Supreme Court’ (2002) 118 Law Quarterly Review 382-396
   
• 2004 - Lord Bingham: ‘The Alabama Claims Arbitration’ (2005) 54 International and Comparative Law Quarterly 1-25
   
• 2006 - Michael Beloff: ‘Paying Judges: Why, Who, Whom, How Much?’ (2006) 18 Denning Law Journal 1-36
   
• 2008 - Lord Hope of Craighead: ‘From Clova to Godmanchester –Public Rights over Private Land’
   
• 2010 - Baroness Hale: ‘Justice for the Jains: Remedies for Bad Administration’
   
• 2012 - Sir John Baker: ‘The legal history nobody knows’
   
• 2013 - Lord Hoffmann: ‘The separation of powers, shadow and substance’
   
• 2014 - Lady Justice Arden: ‘An English Judge in Europe’
   
• 2015 - Baroness Helena Kennedy: ‘Securing justice in a complex world’
   
• 2016 - Sir Stephen Sedley: ‘Law as History’, published as ‘The Lion Beneath the Throne: Law as History’ (2016) 21 Judicial Review 289-301
   
• 2017 - Lord Neuberger: ‘Twenty years a judge: reflections and refractions’
   
• 2018 - Lord Justice Sales: ‘Legalism in Constitutional Law: Judging in a Democracy’ [2018] Public Law 687-707
   
• 2019 - Professor Catherine Barnard: ‘A Red, White and Blue Brexit’
   
• 2022 - Lord Reed: ‘Time Present & Time Past: Legal Development and Legal Tradition in the Common Law’
   
• 2023 - Lord Burrows: ‘Seven Lessons from Inside the UK Supreme Court’
   
• 2024 – Lady Rose of Colmworth: ‘“The Sordid Controversies of Litigants”? Why and When Facts Matter’
   
• 2025 – Professor Dame Hazel Genn: ‘Let’s not talk about Access to Justice: Unravelling the concept to create meaning in the non-legal world’