Welcome.

This is the personal site of David Anderson Q.C.

My legal practice is managed by my clerks at Brick Court Chambers: please contact them if you have a query relating to professional instructions.  The Chambers site also has more about my professional record and interests.

The purpose of this website is to bring together the things I do and will in the future do outside my legal practice.  These include academic and legal writing (often on security, European and Brexit-related issues), media work and comment on issues relating to terrorism, surveillance and counter-extremism.  Some of these – but by no means all – are subjects in which I became interested when serving between 2011 and 2017 as the UK’s Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation.

Copies of all my reports, articles and blog posts produced as Independent Reviewer can be accessed through the archived versions of the Independent Reviewer’s website.

Feel free to contact me at any time, and to follow me on twitter @bricksilk.

Featured articles

  • Can the Backstop be Beaten? (Part 2)

    Here is a further Opinion on the legal effects of the Prime Minister's Brexit deal.  A sequel to the [...]

  • Can the Backstop be Beaten? (Part 1)

    I was asked to advise the People's Vote Campaign, with Jason Coppel QC and Sean Aughey of 11 [...]

  • Reporting Terrorism

    This is the text of a lecture I delivered to journalism students and others at the University of Essex on [...]

  • Who Governs the Internet?

    Counsel, the magazine of the Bar of England and Wales, has published my article on the subject of internet [...]

  • Shades of Independent Review

    This new working paper, Shades of Independent Review (draft updated April 2018) is the sequel to a 2014 article (reproduced by kind permission [...]