Panellist Spotlight: Charles Bishop
Charles Bishop came to law through an interest in the structures that organise society and the norms underpinning them. He is now a barrister at Landmark Chambers specialising in public, planning, environmental, immigration, and human rights law - and one of the experienced practitioners who sits on the Law for Change panel, assessing which public interest cases the organisation should fund.
Law for Change exists to solve a recurring problem in public interest litigation. A case may have strong merits and a legal team willing to act pro bono or on reduced fees, but the client cannot afford to risk a substantial bill if the case goes against them. Law for Change steps in, removing that barrier and allowing cases to proceed that would otherwise never reach court. "That can untie the Gordian knot," according to Charles.
Charles brings a direct understanding of why that kind of funding matters. Before coming to the Bar, he served as Legal and Parliamentary Officer at the Immigration Law Practitioners' Association, working on judicial reviews including challenges to the EU Settlement Scheme and the Napier Barracks asylum accommodation. That period gave him first-hand experience of the gap in public and environmental law, areas where commercial funding is rarely available and legal aid is increasingly constrained, and a developing interest in the strategic question of where resources should be directed across the broader landscape of potential cases.
His route to the Bar had begun earlier, with an undergraduate interest in constitutionalism and human rights as intellectual questions. By the time he finished university, he had concluded that practising as a barrister in public law would allow him to engage with those questions in a way that also contributed meaningfully to people facing difficult and often life-changing legal problems. He now specialises in cases advancing equality for marginalised groups, with a particular focus on the LGBTQ+ community. He is a member of the Attorney General's C panel, approved to represent the government in civil litigation, and a trustee of Rainbow Migration, a charity supporting LGBTQ+ people through the asylum and immigration system.
On the Law for Change panel, members assess funding applications against a consistent set of criteria. Legal merits come first. Beyond that, the central question is whether a case would proceed at all without Law for Change's support. Charles describes a strong candidate as a challenge to a policy or system affecting a significant number of people, where a legal team may be willing to act on reduced fees but the client cannot absorb the risk of an adverse costs order. The panel draws on collective expertise from practitioners across the public law sector, including from organisations such as the Public Law Project and Bindmans, and because litigation is an iterative process, decisions benefit from a wide body of shared experience about which cases are viable and where funding is likely to count most. "The breadth of Law for Change's funding is particularly exciting," Charles says. "The range of successful cases it has funded is remarkable."
Strategic litigation is, he is clear, a demanding process. "You have to set aside your curiosity in a case and focus, relentlessly, on your client's objectives. Is it really in your client's interest to pursue a case that, while having some merit, is ultimately unlikely to succeed? Sometimes the answer might be yes: the matter at stake might be so important that your client has to try everything. But it is important always to be upfront with your client that litigation is only one, emotionally draining and expensive, tool available to them."
He holds the same measured view of what law can achieve for marginalised communities more broadly. Legal intervention can address specific and serious problems in people's lives, and its capacity to drive structural change is more limited. He sees it as a necessary component of efforts to advance equality, and, on its own, an insufficient one
Charles holds the same measured view to what the law can achieve for marginalised communities more broadly. Legal intervention can address specific and serious problems in people's lives but he acknowledged its capacity to drive structural change is more limited. He believes “it is a necessary but insufficient response to the political ideals of equality and liberty.”
Looking ahead, Charles identifies two areas likely to generate significant public law challenges. The first is artificial intelligence and its growing influence on both the practice of law and on decision-making by public bodies, an area he regards as requiring serious engagement from lawyers, funders, and civil society organisations alike.
The second is costs. His preferred reform to the UK's public law framework would be to significantly widen the availability of costs-capping orders and to allow applications for those orders to be determined before the permission stage, when a court first decides whether a case is arguable. This would substantially reverse the effect of the Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015, which he considers to have placed significant obstacles in the path of legitimate public interest challenges.
On Law for Change's direction, he would like to see the organisation extend its reach into larger, higher-stakes cases where the merits and conditions are right. The impact to date has, in his view, been considerable. Funding that removes the barrier of potential adverse costs has allowed cases to proceed that would not otherwise have done so.