Joshua Rozenberg KC (hon) is Britain’s most experienced full-time legal commentator.
He is known for his independence, his authority and his ability to explain complicated legal issues with simplicity, clarity and wit. Because he trained as a lawyer before becoming a legal journalist, Joshua is often the first port of call for broadcasters faced with a breaking legal story. He is the only journalist to have been appointed King’s Counsel honoris causa. All other honorary silks since the late 19th century have been practitioners or legal academics.
Joshua is an honorary Master of the Bench (bencher) of Gray’s Inn. He was a non-executive board member of the Law Commission from 2019 to 2024.
A Lawyer Writes, the blog he launched on Substack in 2020, provides unrivalled reporting and analysis of legal developments as seen from the United Kingdom. More than 14,000 readers have signed up for the emails he sends out — often four or five times a week. A substantial proportion of those readers have subscribed to the premium service.
His most recent book is Enemies of the People? How Judges Shape Society. Published in 2020, it was well received by critics are readers alike.
After taking a law degree at Oxford, Joshua trained as a solicitor, qualifying in 1976. He has never practised and, to maintain his independence, he no longer keeps his name on the roll.
He holds honorary doctorates in law from the University of Hertfordshire (1999), Nottingham Trent University (2012) — above, with Sir Michael Parkinson, chancellor 2008-2014 — the University of Lincoln (2014) and the University of Law (2014).
Since 2008, he has written a twice-monthly column for the Law Society Gazette. From 2010 to 2016, he wrote a weekly commentary for the Guardian website and from 2019 to 2022 he wrote a monthly column for The Critic magazine.
Joshua was the BBC’s legal correspondent for 15 years before moving in 2000 to the Daily Telegraph. He resigned as the newspaper’s legal editor in the summer of 2007 but continued writing a weekly column until the end of 2008.
He appears regularly on Sky News, on the BBC’s many news outlets and on other news networks in the UK and abroad.
A decade after he left the BBC, Joshua returned in 2010 to present the popular Radio 4 series Law in Action, a programme he had launched in 1984. He presented the last edition in 2024.
Well respected by lawyers and the judiciary, Joshua is often asked to chair or address legal conferences and other corporate events.
He was accredited as a mediator by the ADR group, though he has never practised.
Joshua has a particular interest in constitutional reform, dating back to his time as producer of The Week in Westminster on Radio 4 in the early 1980s. Freedom of expression is another of his interests, and he wrote the well-reviewed book Privacy and the Press for Oxford University Press (2004, updated 2005; Chinese edition 2012).
Earlier books include Trial of Strength, which examined the tensions between ministers and judges under the Thatcher government, The Search for Justice, an anatomy of the law in the mid-1990s and The Case for the Crown, which charted the launch of the Crown Prosecution Service.
He lives in London and Jerusalem.
Joshua Rozenberg 