Masters of the Bench

Carol Harlow is Emeritus Professor of Law at the London School of Economics. She was educated at Queen’s College girls’ school on Harley Street and King’s College London, where she read Law and had a good deal of fun.

After being Called, she went to live first in Uganda, where she worked as a lawyer in a fused profession and taught extramural classes for Makerere University, and later in Lesotho, where she taught Law and undertook poor person’s defences in murder cases – a rather frightening experience for someone who had never practised!

Returning home, Carol taught at the newly opened Inns of Court School of Law and then at Kingston Polytechnic (now University). She then moved to the LSE, where she has taught and researched since 1978. Her primary teaching area is administrative law, on which subject she has published several books and articles.

She retains a strong interest in comparative law and is a board member of the European Law Journal.

Carol has taught at the Universities of New South Wales, Auckland, Trento, and Duke University in North Carolina. She spent several periods at the European University Institute in Florence as Jean Monnet Professor, working on public law and public access to the EU political process. She joined the European Group for Public Administration and, in 2000, gave the keynote lecture on ‘Public Administration in the Global Environment’. She also works with the Cambridge Centre for Public Law.

Carol sat for eight years as a lay member of a Supplementary Benefit Appeal Tribunal. She worked for many years  with the Legal Action Group, which she Chaired in 1992, and has also been a council member of the human rights organisation Justice. With Richard Rawlings, she wrote a study of the use of law for political purposes (Pressure Through Law, 1992).

She was appointed Queen’s Counsel (honoris causa) in 1996; Fellow of the British Academy in 1999; and Fellow of the London School of Economics in 2005. She was elected a Bencher of the Middle Temple in 2009, is Joint Master of the Garden, is an active Scholarship Interviewer, and was Lent Reader 2019.