Сэр Энди Никол, судья Высокого суда, прославился защитой гражданских свобод и делом Джонни Деппа

Sir Andrew Nicol, who has died aged 75, did much to enhance the defence of civil liberties as a barrister and academic, before his appointment as a high court judge in 2009. In that capacity he is mainly remembered for his calm and careful stewardship of Johnny Depp’s libel suit in 2020 against the publishers of the Sun newspaper after their article suggested Depp had assaulted his former wife Amber Heard. English judges are fated to be recalled by their more celebrity-centred cases, but Andy’s intellectual contributions to the development of media and immigration law were much more truly memorable. The elder child of Margaret (nee Mason), a physiotherapist, and Duncan Nicol, a gas engineer, Andrew was born in Ashtead, Surrey, and educated at the City of London Freemen’s school, Ashtead Park. After taking a law degree at Cambridge and a master’s at Harvard, he worked in housing policy for the state of California (1975-76), and then for a year at a top commercial law firm in Sydney, before returning in 1977 to lecture in that subject at the LSE. His career trajectory to wealth and respectability as a commercial lawyer was interrupted when he became my pupil, during the controversial ABC official secrets trial in 1978. On the first day, Jeremy Hutchinson QC discovered that Labour’s attorney general, Sam Silkin, had secretly ordered that the jury should be vetted for “extremist opinions”. Andy was given the task of finding some authority to object to this outrage, so he rushed to the LSE library to excavate its rare copy of Jeremy Bentham’s 1821 book The Elements of the Art of Packing, as Applied to Special Juries, which had comprehensively denounced the practice. It was quoted extensively by Hutchinson in his submission that the trial was unconstitutional, later celebrated in a book by EP Thompson (Writing by Candlelight), and a booklet by Harriet Harman, who was then the National Council for Civil Liberties solicitor. Having been called to the bar at the Middle Temple, Andy was quickly made a member of chambers at 1 Dr Johnson’s Buildings, headed by Emlyn Hooson and John Mortimer, and built a practice in immigration law, bolstered by a book, Subjects, Citizens, Aliens and Others (1990). He developed an interest in media law, acting for David Leigh and the Observer in 1986 in a case that stopped a practice in lower courts of withholding the names of magistrates from the press. “There is no such thing as an anonymous JP” declared the divisional court. He was by my side when we successfully defended the New Statesman from a charge of contempt of court for interviewing jurors in the Jeremy Thorpe trial of 1979, although on that occasion he was reported to the Bar Council for wearing brown shoes, which, under absurd traditional rules at the time, could never be worn beneath a black gown. He maintained his LSE lectureship until 1987, from which vantage point he talent-spotted the best of his students for pupillages, such as Heather Rogers KC and Mrs Justice Heather Williams. In 1990 we established Doughty Street Chambers: his commercial knowledge became invaluable and he served as treasurer and for a long term as a member of the chambers management committee. In 1995 he was made a QC. Andy was in many ways a trailblazer. He represented the UK representatives of the African National Congress in a case of false imprisonment against the apartheid South African government. In 1996, he established the duty of the police under the then Race Relations Act not to discriminate against Black victims of crime, even if the victim had not expressly requested their help. He was the intellectual architect of the appeal in the important case of Kiranjit Ahluwalia, a badly battered wife, driven to kill her husband in 1989 after an arranged marriage. She had been traumatised and reduced to a state of what is termed learned helplessness by his brutality, a fact unnoticed at her trial, where she had been convicted of murder and jailed for life. Andy’s appeal argument that she was in fact suffering from diminished responsibility was accepted by an enlightened chief justice – Peter Taylor – who reduced the offence to manslaughter in 1992, enabling Kiranjit’s immediate release. The case has served as an important precedent for victims of domestic violence ever since. In 1984 Andy and I wrote the first book to bear the title Media Law, a survey of the disparate strands of common and statute law that were being used to oppress the press. We originally thought of calling it The Journalists’ Toothbrush, because so many reporters were being summonsed to court and advised to pack overnight bags, in case they were sent to prison. It began as a slim volume, but in time, by its fifth edition, it ran to more than 1,000 pages. We wrote separate chapters under the same names, and my opinion that a trial held in secret was not a trial at all was cited, to Andy’s embarrassment, years later, when as a judge he was persuaded to impose a blanket secrecy order on a terrorist trial. He had the dubious pleasure of having his own book quoted on an appeal from his own decision, and this was a rare case when a decision of his was overturned on appeal. His work as a judge was punctilious and quite literally learned. Much as he was condemned on social media by fans of Depp when he ruled against the actor, his decision was considered to be appeal-proof. It was in no way undermined by the different proceeding in the US court in 2022 that Depp and Heard brought against each other. There the jurors ruled in favour of Depp’s claim of defamation across three counts, awarding the actor $15m. Heard won on one count of her countersuit; she was awarded $2m. Andy was a kind and unassuming man with an infectious sense of humour and one of the finest minds available to immigrants and journalists in peril in the courts. At Doughty Street he was unstinting in giving help to younger barristers. That commitment reflected his personality. Tall, skinny and built like a whippet, he was generous and welcoming to those he knew well and those he barely knew. He brought his managerial skills to the judiciary as presiding judge on the South-Eastern Circuit (2011-14) and deputy chairman of the Boundary Commission (2017-20). Politically, Andy was always on the side of social justice, a commitment shared by his longtime partner, Camilla Palmer KC, an equality law specialist and now a mediator at Doughty Street, whom he married in 2005. They lived in north London, where they brought up two sons, Robert and Jamie. All three survive him, along with a granddaughter, Lark, and his sister, Fiona.