Nick Kilford is a College Lecturer and Fellow in Law at Christ’s. His research and teaching interests are in public law – the law regulating the power of the state, the conduct of its institutions, and its interactions with private actors and individuals. Nick supervises Constitutional Law and Administrative Law, and is Director of Studies in Law at Christ’s.
Nick’s research concerns the way that the UK’s constitutional law regulates and explains legislative authority – that is, law-making power – and the implications of the diffusion of that authority to sub-national institutions. His current work looks at the way courts understand and situate legislative authority in constitutional terms, and the tools they use to support or constrain it. Nick’s research has three core strands: (i) how Westminster’s (legally unlimited) legislative power is understood by the courts, (ii) the UK’s subnational legislative arrangements (devolution), and (iii) the way courts handle legislative texts from these sources. Uniting these enquiries is the question of whether there are fundamental norms and principles which regulate, constrain, or empower legislative institutions and govern their interactions, and how these principles are changing over time. This is important because this question can help us understand how the relationships between law-making bodies are managed by the law, and the extent to which those bodies can act inconsistently with wider constitutional norms.
Nick’s PhD, completed at St Edmund’s College, Cambridge with the support of the Cambridge Law Journal PhD Studentship, was passed without corrections in 2024. His PhD examined the way that devolution and parliamentary sovereignty interact, and this theme remains at the core of his research agenda. He is also interested, however, in wider issues relating to the decentralisation (and recentralisation) of constitutional power, such as the law relating to the UK’s departure from the EU and UK Internal Market Law, and he has written (and acted as a consultant) on these matters.
Nick joins Christ’s following a Postdoctoral Research Associateship and a Career Development Fellowship at Durham Law School and is a member of the ORA 7-funded project on Unwritten Constitutional Norms and Principles. Nick has degrees from Durham (LLB, MJur) and Cambridge (PhD).
Selected Publications:
Mark Elliott and Nicholas Kilford, ‘The Relational Principle of Parliamentary Sovereignty’ [2026] Public Law (forthcoming).
Nicholas Kilford, ‘The Market Access Principles and the Subordination of Devolved
Competence’ (2024) 75 Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly 77.
Anurag Deb and Nicholas Kilford, ‘Devolved Governments’ Powers to Change and Replace Assimilated Law’ in Anurag Deb and Others, Devolution in a Post Brexit Landscape’ (Civil Society Alliance, Human Rights Consortium 2024).
Nicholas Kilford, ‘The Northern Ireland Protocol in the Supreme Court’, (2023) 82 Cambridge Law Journal 200.
Nicholas Kilford, ‘Limitation, Empowerment and the Value of Legal Certainty in the Treaty Incorporation References Case’, (2021) 26 Judicial Review 321.
Awards and Prizes:
Reimagine Research Initiative (£2824.16; 2024)
Researcher Development Grant (£1000; 2023)
Cambridge Law Journal Partial PhD Studentship (2022)
Cambridge Law Journal PhD Studentship (2019)
Advanced Issues in Public Law Prize (First Prize; 2017)
Grey College Half-Colours (2017); Full Colours (2018)
