Nicholas Barber

On the undergraduate course, I teach Constitutional Law for Mods (the first two terms of the course) and Administrative Law for Finals. In the Faculty of Law, I lecture on the undergraduate Constitutional Law course and the graduate Constitutional Theory course. I supervise doctoral dissertations on a wide range of constitutional law topics, including the role of the judiciary in Hong Kong, deference in public law adjudication, and constitutional pluralism in the Ghanaian constitutional order.

Nick Barber joined the Oxford Law Faculty in 1998 as a Fixed Term Fellow at Brasenose before moving to a tenured Fellowship at Trinity College in 2000.   In 2013 he was appointed University Lecturer in Constitutional Law and in 2017 he was appointed Professor of Constitutional Law and Theory.  In 2012 and 2013 he was a visiting Professor at Renmin University, China.  From 2019-23 he was Associate Dean (Research).  In 2023 he delivered the keynote address at the Dutch Association of Constitutional Law.  In 2024 he was the James Meralls Visiting Fellow at Melbourne University, and in 2025 he gave the Sir Richard Ground Lecture in the Turks and Caicos.  From 2025-2026 he will act as Proctor.

He has lectured extensively on constitutional law and theory in many countries.  He has published many papers in these areas, and his book - The Constitutional State – was published in 2011, and has been widely reviewed.  His second book, The Principles of Constitutionalism, was published by Oxford University Press in summer 2018.  His most recent book, The United Kingdom Constitution: An Introduction was published in the Clarendon Law Series in late 2021.  Both The American Journal of Jurisprudence and The Jerusalem Review of Legal Studies have published collections of essays on his work.  

He was founder editor of the United Kingdom Constitutional Law Blog, and he was a co-author, with Jeff King and Tom Hickman, of the blog post that sparked the litigation in Miller, a post which first advanced the arguments eventually adopted by the High Court and Supreme Court.  

Alongside Richard Ekins and Timothy Endicott, he is co-director of The Programme for the Foundations of Law and Constitutional Government.

Barber N, ‘Entrenchment’ in R Bellamy and J King (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Constitutional Theory (Cambridge University Press 2024)

BARBER N, ‘Why Precedent Works’ in T ENDICOTT, H Krisjannson and S Lewis (eds.), Philosophical Foundations of Precedent (Oxford University Press 2023)

BARBER N, ‘Accommodation and Resolution in the Good Constitution’ in V Jackson and Y Dawood (eds.), Constitutionalism and a Right to Effective Government (Cambridge University Press 2022)

Barber N, ‘The Significance of the Common Understanding in Legal Theory’ in D Kyritsis and S Lakin (eds.), The Methodology of Constitutional Theory (Hart 2022)

Barber N, The United Kingdom Constitution An Introduction (Oxford University Press 2021)

Barber N, ‘Playing Hardball with the Queen’ (Oxford Human Rights Hub, 1 August 2019)

Barber N, ‘Populist Leaders and Political Parties’ [2019] German Law Journal

Barber N, ‘Prorogation, Prerogative, and the Supreme Court’ (Harvard Law Review Blog, 1 October 2019)

Barber N, ‘The Point of the State and the Point of Public Law’ in E Fisher, J King and A L. Young (eds.), The Fundamentals and Future of Public Law (Oxford University Press 2019)

Barber N, Cahill M and Ekins R, The Rise and Fall of the European Constitution (Hart Publishing 2019)

Barber N, ‘The two Europes’, Rise and Fall of the European Constitution (Bloomsbury Publishing 2019)

Barber N, Hickman T and King J, ‘Reflections on Miller’ in D Clarry (ed.), Supreme Court Yearbook (Appellate Press 2018)

Barber N, ‘A Note on the Separation of Powers’ in M Elliott and R Thomas (eds.), Public Law (Oxford University Press 2017)

Barber N, ‘The Legal Academic In the Internet Age’ (United Kingdom Constitutional Law Association Blog, 1 June 2017) (available at https://ukconstitutionallaw.org)