After two years of national service in the Royal Artillery, from 1947 to 1949, he read law at Wadham College, Oxford, where he was awarded an honorary fellowship in 1992.

He sat with the Master of the Rolls, Lord Donaldson of Lymington, in M v Home Office, finding Home Secretary Kenneth Baker guilty of contempt of court after he refused to bring an asylum seeker back from Zaire, where he had been deported contrary to an earlier court order.

He also sat in the constitution of the Court of Appeal which quashed the conviction of Judith Ward for involvement in the bombing of a coach on the M62 in 1974.

The committee was set up in late 1994 by John Major's government after the cash-for-questions affair, and has conducted numerous other inquiries.

In 2000, at the request of Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, he investigated the issue of paedophile priests in the Nolan Report.

Outside of the law, he was also Chancellor of the University of Essex[3] from 1997 to 2002, a Deputy Lieutenant of Kent and a Knight of St Gregory.

In retirement, Lord Nolan suffered from an unspecified degenerative disease, dying in 2007 at age 78.