Professor Richard Nobles, LLB (Hons) (Warwick) LLM (Yale), Solicitor

Nobles

Professor of Law

Location: Mile End
email: r.nobles@qmul.ac.uk
Phone: +44 (0)20 7882 3960
Website: http://www.law.qmul.ac.uk/cjc

Richard Nobles joined Queen Mary in September 2006 as a Professor in Law, having previously held the position of Reader in Law at the LSE. He has written extensively on the Law of Pensions, and is the author of Pensions Employment and the Law (OUP, Oxford, 1992). He advised the Pensions Ombudsman from 1993-97, and was seconded to that office in 1998.

Since 1990, Professor Nobles has been researching jointly with Professor David Schiff on criminal appeals and miscarriages of justice. Together they obtained an Economic and Social Research Council Research Award in 1991/92 to investigate the role of the Court of Appeal in remedying miscarriages of justice involving the re-assessment of expert evidence. The research led to a submission to the Royal Commission on Criminal Justice. More recently their collaboration has involved numerous publications and seminar papers on diverse topics applying autopoietic systems theory.

Professor Nobles is currently researching into the application of autopoietic systems theory to jurisprudence in general, and appeal systems within law, in particular.

Publications:

Work in Progress

  • Jurisprudence as Self-description- Mini-Symposium on Europe and Social Systems Theory, Montreal, 15 April 2010

Key publications

  • (with D Schiff) 'Disobedience to Law - Debbie Purdy's Case' (2010) 73 Modern Law Review 295
  • (with D Schiff) ‘Public confidence in criminal justice: the lessons from miscarriages of justice’ (2009) 48(5) Howard Journal of Criminal Justice 461
  • (with D Schiff), 'After Ten Years: An Investment in Justice?' in M. Naughton (ed) The Criminal Cases Review Commission: Hope for the Innocent? (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), ch.11
  • (with D Schiff) ‘Why do judges talk the way they do?’ (2009) 5.1 International Journal of Law in Context 25
  • (with D Schiff), 'Jurisprudence as Self-Description: Natural Law and Positivism within the English Legal System' in G-P Calliess, A Fischer-Lescano, D Wielsch and P Zumbansen (eds) Soziologische Jurisprudenz: Festschrift fur Gunther Teubner (De Gruyter Recht, 2009), 359-374.
  • (with D Schiff) ‘Economic Analysis of Law’ 355, ‘Criminal Cases Review Commission’ 268, ‘Miscarriages of Justice’ 796, ‘Systems Theory’ 1149, in P. Cane and J. Conaghan (eds.) The New Oxford Companion to Law (OUP, 2008).
  • (with D Schiff) ‘Absurd Asymmetry - a Comment on R v Cottrell and Fletcher and BM, KK and DP (Petitioners) v Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission’ (2008) 71 Modern Law Review 464
  • (with D Schiff) Review of O Perez and G Teubner (eds), Paradoxes and Inconsistencies in the Law, (2007) 70 Modern Law Review 505
  • (with D Schiff) 'The Emperor's New Clothes', Review Article of Ronald Dworkin, Justice in Robes, (2007) 70 Modern Law Review 139
  • (with D Schiff) 'Theorising the Criminal Trial and Criminal Appeal: Finality, Truth and Rights' in A Duff, L Farmer, S Marshall and V Tadros (eds), The Trial on Trial, Volume 2 (Hart Publishing, Oxford, 2006), ch 14
  • (with D Schiff) 'Communicating Moral Responsibility through Criminal Law' Review of V Tadros, Criminal Responsibility, (2006) 26 Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 207
  • (with D Schiff) A Sociology of Jurisprudence (Hart Publishing, Oxford, 2006)
  • (with D Schiff) 'A Sociology of Jurisprudence' in M Freeman (ed), Law and Sociology (OUP, Oxford, 2006) ch 3
  • (with D Schiff) 'Guilt and Innocence in the Criminal Justice System: A Comment on R (Mullen) v Secretary of State for the Home Department ' (2006) 69 Modern Law Review 80
  • (with D Schiff) 'A Reply to Graham Zellick' [2005] Criminal Law Review 951
  • (with D Schiff) 'Misleading Statistics Within Criminal Trials' (2005) 2 Significance  17
  • (with D Schiff) 'The Criminal Cases Review Commission: Establishing a Workable Relationship with the Court of Appeal' [2005] Criminal Law Review 173
  • (with D Schiff) 'A Story of Miscarriage: Law in the Media' (2004) 31 Journal of Law and Society 221
  • (with D Schiff) 'Introduction' to the English translation of N Luhmann, Law as a Social System (edited by F Kastner, R Nobles, D Schiff and R Ziegert (OUP, Oxford, 2004)
  • (with J Penner and D Schiff (eds)), Introduction to Jurisprudence and Legal Theory: Commentary and Materials (Butterworths, London, 2002, now published by OUP)
  • (with D Schiff) 'The Right to Appeal and Workable Systems of Justice' (2002) 65 Modern Law Review 676
  • 'Access to Justice through Ombudsmen: The Courts' Response to the Pensions Ombudsman' (2002) Civil Justice Quarterly 94
  • 'Keeping Ombudsmen in their place-The Courts and the Pensions Ombudsman' [2001] Public Law 308
  • (with D Schiff) 'Criminal justice: Autopoietic Insights' in Law's New Boundaries: The Consequences of Legal Autopoiesis (eds) J Pribán and D Nelken (Ashgate, Dartmouth, 2001) ch 9
  • (with D Schiff) 'Due Process and Dirty Harry Dilemmas: Criminal Appeals and the Human Rights Act' (2001) 64 Modern Law Review 911
  • (with D Schiff) 'The Criminal Cases Review Commission: Reporting Success?' (2001) 64 Modern Law Review 64, 280
  • (with D Schiff) Understanding Miscarriages of Justice: Law, the Media, and the Inevitability of Crisis (OUP, Oxford, 2000)

Research interests:

System Theory as applied to Law; Criminal Appeals, Miscarriages of Justice (former research interest Pensions Law).

Supervision:

Professor Nobles welcomes proposals for postgraduate research in the fields of criminal appeals and miscarriages of justice, the application of autopoietic systems theory that involves the legal system's relationship to other subsystems of communication, trust law and the law relating to pensions.

Current PhD Students

Bostjan Makarovic: The Evolution Of EU Communications Law And The Shift To Next Generation Networks

Undergraduate teaching:

  • LAW6021 Jurisprudence and Legal Theory

Postgraduate teaching:

  • Research Methods - MA by Research in Law