‘The law lags behind changing attitudes: I want to challenge that’ - Law for Change co-founder Charles Keidan tells The Times

Law for Change co-founder and former Supreme Court claimant in landmark civil partnership case Charles Keidan in conversation with Catherine Baski for The Times

After six years and three court cases Charles Keidan and Rebecca Steinfeld won a legal bid for the right to have a civil partnership instead of marriage.

In 2018 the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that restricting civil partnerships, which were introduced in 2014, to same-sex couples was discriminatory.

But it was not until after parliament had changed the law that the couple were able to enter into a civil union at Kensington and Chelsea Town Hall on New Year’s Eve 2019.

Keidan, 46, has used the knowledge gained from that experience to help launch a fund to support legal actions, which, he explains, have a “clear public benefit and tangible moral purpose”.

Co-founded with the lawyer Stephen Kinsella and the philanthropist David Graham, Law for Change, he says, fills a gap to use the law “as a tool of social change, to increase access to justice and clarify the rights of marginalised groups”.

The trio spent the past year setting up the mechanics of the fund, which has so far amassed £750,000 from its founders and others.

“It’s been a great privilege to be able to pay forward some of what I’ve learnt,” says Keidan.

Law for Change has its formal launch next month at the office of the London law firm Kingsley Napley. But it has already backed several cases.

These include a case on the government’s failure to implement Grenfell Inquiry recommendations on emergency evacuation plans for disabled people, and a High Court challenge to the government’s Rwanda asylum policy.

It also backed a case brought by the civil rights group Liberty challenging the Metropolitan Police’s gangs matrix database. That resulted in a complete overhaul of the database and the removal of more than 1,000 “low-risk” young men from it.

A panel of more than 30 legal advisers help to decide which cases to back, supported by a smaller “impact” panel.

Keidan accepts that there is scope for disagreement on what constitutes “moral” purpose, but predicts that within the areas in which the fund seeks to have an effect — such as testing how public institutions operate — there will be a lot of opportunity for consensus.

His own civil partnership case, he suggests, was a good example of that — gaining support from people such as the gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell on the left to the Conservative MP Tim Loughton on the right.

The fund, says Keidan, expects cases to be arguable and have clear chances of success, but as the law often lags behind changing societal attitudes, cases such as his own civil partnership claim would not be excluded.

“The case that I and my partner bought in 2015 had a 50 per cent chance of success,” he says. “We lost in the High Court, two to one very narrowly in the Court of Appeal, and won five-nil in Lady Hale’s Supreme Court, with the wonderful late Lord Kerr delivering the ruling.

“Our case caught an interest and appetite for change around access to civil partnerships, and what initially appeared to be uncertain led to us being vindicated and a court ruling in our favour.”

Keidan insists that the fund is “not in the business of contributing to polarisation”. As a funder of last resort, he argues that as it is likely to back cases that do not grab the headlines — those issues on which public debate is fiercely polarised are unlikely to need its help.

From his own case Keidan learnt “how hard it can be to change something, how tenacious you need to be and the extent to which you need to have support from a multiplicity of places”.

In the six years that it took to reach the Supreme Court judgment, the couple had two children and moved house three times. As middle-class academics, they were able to “cobble together” support from networks that others would not have.

While the case was “ultimately very rewarding”, it came at a cost. “After we won in the Supreme Court and after the law had changed, everyone was saying you must be feeling good.”

But, he says: “I felt absolutely exhausted and couldn’t get out of bed. I had to take five weeks off work with burn-out. Change can take its toll and the legal effort can be very demanding.”

Keidan and his partner believe the institution of marriage is patriarchal and sexist. “We didn’t want to be husband and wife. We were trying to develop a partnership of equals and to set an example for our children,” he says, adding that the surname of their children is a fusion of both of their surnames: Keidstein.

Born in London in 1976, Keidan exhibited the sense of social justice and equality that has fired his career while still at school. His lawyer father was company secretary at a property business and his mother, who had trained as a ballet teacher, brought up the family.

Aged 16 Keidan left University College School, a private school in Hampstead, and enrolled at the state-run Woodhouse Sixth Form College. “I didn’t believe it was right that my parents should be able to buy me a better education that was denied to other children.”

After studying history at Cambridge University, Keidan had a brief spell working for an MP before joining the Pears Family Charitable Foundation and then broadening his philanthropic interest with academic posts before becoming executive editor at Alliance, a magazine on practical philanthropy.

He and his partner, who is head of policy for a coalition of health and social care charities, live in London and have three daughters, aged seven, five and one.

Law for Change co-founder Charles Keidan, who won a landmark Supreme Court case on the right to a civil partnership, in conversation with the The Times’ Catherine Baksi on why he co-founded the legal fund. Published 16th February 2023.