​James Wilson

I grew up in New Zealand but have lived in the United Kingdom since 1998.  I studied law and political science at Auckland University, and was awarded a senior prize in my final year at Law School.  

 

After graduating I worked in private practice in both New Zealand and London, and later moved to be a legal author, editor and manager.  I managed a law reporting team and the journals & magazines team at LexisNexis. I have trained many lawyers over the years in different forms of writing and editing.  I presently work as Head of Standards Governance for BSI.  For more detail please see my Linkedin profile.  

 

I always enjoyed writing, though for many years only wrote formal legal documents and reports.  I fired off the odd letter to The Times newspaper here and there, but started writing for the general public in earnest in 2009. In that year, I was involved in a book in a variety of capacities - commissioning, editing and production - and wrote a set of chapter introductions.  The reception was encouraging enough for me to start writing more 'interesting' material as opposed to dry legal fare.  

 

Initially I blogged for Halsbury's Law Exchange, an independent legal think tank set up and funded by LexisNexis (since absorbed into the general LN website).  For a time I served as Head of Policy.  I set up my own blog in parallel, initially just for personal convenience, but after it started to attract an audience I started blogging exclusively there.  I have also been published on the UK Human Rights Blog, the UK Supreme Court Blog, the New Law Journal, Estates Gazette and Criminal Law & Justice Weekly. 

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My first book, Cases, Causes and Controversies: fifty tales from the law, was published by Wildy, Simmonds & Hill in 2012.  My second book, Court and Bowled: tales of cricket and the law, was published, again by Wildy, Simmonds & Hill, in 2014.  Also in 2014 the book Cases that Changed Our Lives, vol 2, was published by LexisNexis.  I was the joint editor and contributed both chapter introductions and an essay on religion and the law.  My third book was Trials & Tribulations: Uncommon Tales of the Common Law, once more published by Wildy, Simmonds & Hill, in 2015.  In 2017, a second edition of Court and Bowled was published.  In 2018 I published Noble Savages: The Savage Club and the Great War 1914-18, a history of members of London's Savage Club during the First World War. In 2020 the paperback/coffee table version of Noble Savages was published, with many more pictures and a small amount of extra text.

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My most recent book is a biography of the famous English judge Lord Denning, published in March 2023. 

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I have been interviewed by Radio New Zealand on match-fixing in cricket and have been quoted by different newspapers as well - see the Media tab above.   

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More recently, I have been asked by my university to provide a short biographical sketch explaining how I came to write Lord Denning's biography.  The note I produced can be read here.

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