Jeffrey Jowell

In 2011 he was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of St. Michael and St. George (KCMG) for "services to human rights, democracy and the rule of law in Europe".

[3] He is a Bencher of Middle Temple[4] and holds honorary degrees from the Universities of Athens, Ritsumeikan, Cape Town and Paris 2.

In 2016 he was awarded the National Order of the Southern Cross by the President of Brazil for his contribution to constitutionalism and the rule of law internationally.

[6] Jowell has held a number of public appointments including Non-Executive Director of the Office of Rail Regulation; Member of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution; Chair of the British Waterways Ombudsman Committee,[7] Chair of the Council of the Institute for Philanthropy, and Trustee of a number of charities, including the Sigrid Rausing Trust and the UK Branch of the South African Constitutional Court Trust.

This interest in institutional design led to his second major area of interest, the merits and demerits of judicial control of administrative discretion, challenging the widely held view at that time that such as welfare recipients needed no right to challenge decisions to grant or refuse their benefits.

[11]  He then turned to a third issue, neglected at the time, of the extent to which judges could interfere with the substance of, rather than the procedure by which, decisions are made by public bodies (under the notions of ‘unreasonableness’ and ‘proportionality’[12]).

In 1993, Jowell joined Lord Woolf as joint author of the leading text, de Smith’s Judicial Review[17] (then in its third edition, now in its eighth[18]), which proved to be an important channel through which to advance his ideas to the practising profession.

In both roles he advanced programmes to make UCL more connected to London intellectual life and to involve practitioners and judges in its legal work.