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.

I have published many papers in the area of constitutional law and constitutional theory. My first book, The Constitutional State, was published in 2011 and examines the nature of the state, the ways in its people, territory, and rules combine and interact. My second book, The Principles of Constitutionalism, was published by Oxford University Press in 2018 and examines the principles that should structure constitutions, and draws on the model of the state developed in the first volume.

I am currently working on a book on the United Kingdom’s constitution, to be published in 2021.

I was the founder editor of the United Kingdom Constitutional Law Blog. I was also 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 about Article 50 and Brexit.

Alongside Richard Ekins, I am co-director of The Programme for the Foundations of Law and Constitutional Government. Based in the Faculty of Law, the Programme supports leading scholarly work on the nature of law and its social, political and moral foundations. It convenes seminars, workshops and conferences examining foundational questions in constitutional law and theory, and in legal and political thought more broadly.

‘Entrenchment’ in R Bellamy and J King (eds), The Cambridge Handbook of Constitutional Theory (Cambridge University Press 2020) (forthcoming)

‘Playing Hardball with the Queen’ (2019) Oxford Human Rights Hub

‘Populist Leaders and Political Parties’ (2019) German Law Journal 129

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

‘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)

With Maria Cahill and Richard Ekins (eds), The Rise and Fall of European Constitutionalism (Hart Publishing 2019)

‘The Two Europes’ in N. W. Barber, M. Cahill, and R. Ekins (eds), The Rise and Fall of the European Constitution (Hart Publishing 2019)

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

‘A Note on the Separation of Powers’, in mark Elliott and Robert Thomas (eds), Public Law (Oxford University Press 2017)

‘The Legal Academic In the Internet Age’, U.K. Const. L. Blog (14th Jun 2017) (available at https://ukconstitutionallaw.org)