Robin Callendar Smith has been a part of our community since 1970. He completed his LLB in 1973 at Queen Mary College before returning to CCLS to study his LLM and PhD from 2007. He has also held teaching posts with us and is now an Honorary Professor of Media Law. Read his story:
I completed my LLB between 1970-1973 at Queen Mary College (now Queen Mary University of London) at Mile End. It was then a newly formed, avant garde law school within the University of London. I had worked as a journalist for nearly five years before studying law and QMC was the only UK law faculty to accept that I might still retain studying skills despite being a (slightly) more mature student.
I was part of Roy Goode’s introduction to teaching. I was a member of that ever-needy body of undergraduate students who crave comprehensive lecture notes that cover everything. Professor Goode aced that by providing us with weekly page proofs of his first magnum opus, Commercial Law.
Nearly 35 years after my LLB, in 2007, I was appointed a part-time Information Rights Tribunal Judge dealing with Freedom of Information and Data Protection appeals from the Information Commissioner. The President of the Tribunal at the time, Professor John Angel, had completed his LLM at CCLS. He came to watch me deal with a five-day point of law hearing in a BBC FOIA appeal and, at the end of it, gently suggested that I would benefit from auditing the Information and Data Protection law module led by Professors Christopher Millard and Ian Walden at the new QMUL/CCLS site on the edge of Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
I loved the course... but then hated the fact that I was only an “auditor” and not a real student.
So, the following year, I completed my LLM at CCLS in Computer and Communications Law. Since 1977 I had worked during the weekends as a pre-production media law barrister for national tabloid newspapers. After 30 years I thought I was the bee’s knees on Media Law, Copyright and Data Protection/Information Rights Law. I was so wrong that my ears still burn with embarrassment at the depth of my real ignorance. It will be no surprise that one of the achievements I particularly value was graduating in 2010 with Distinction and winning a subject prize.
By now, I was hooked. As part of my LLM I had completed a dissertation on the developing law of misuse of private information: Freddie Starr ate my privacy, OK!? That formed the basis for my PhD submission... but this late-life academic renaissance was all happening in my mid-60s. Was it a step too far?
Ian Walden (now Head of CCLS) and Christopher Millard (Head of the Cloud Legal Project) agreed to supervise this project and steered me through the highs and the lows of it. Four years later, despite continuing to work as a Tribunal Judge as well as a financial, energy and premium-rate telephony regulator, I endured a gruelling two-and-a-half-hour viva. My thesis Celebrity Privacy and the Development of the Judicial Concept of Proportionality survived without corrections. In November 2014, aged 67 and wearing the new blue, black and white QMUL doctoral robes, I was on the graduation stage at Mile End again.
The most valuable portion of my CCLS experience, without any doubt, has been the opportunity to teach across a range of different undergraduate and postgraduate courses first as a Visiting Professor and, most recently, as Honorary Professor of Media Law.
And my CCLS journey continues. Compulsory judicial retirement on my 70th birthday in 2017 meant re-skilling myself as a domestic and international Technology, Media and Telecommunications Arbitrator, Mediator and Adjudicator. I am reaching the mid-point of my second LLM at CCLS, completing an online programme in International Arbitration which I can keep up with anywhere in the world, reinforcing my legal knowledge and skills in this area.
And, thanks to the eclectic mix and range of practical legal and regulatory skills that I have been able to develop at QMUL/CCLS, in the atmosphere of the practical post-graduate legal excellence created by Roy Goode in his vision for the Centre, I may shortly be undertaking some other international opportunities.
CCLS is the world’s leading teaching and research centre on international arbitration as well as being high in the world rankings in other disciplines like Banking and Finance, Intellectual Property and Technology, Media and Telecommunications. For me, it has truly been life-changing being part of its first 40 years.
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