Thomas Martin Partington

Thomas Martin Partington, (born 5 March 1944) is a British retired legal scholar and barrister. He is Emeritus professor of Law at the University of Bristol.

He has over 45 years' experience as a law teacher, researcher, and writer on a wide variety of legal subjects (including administrative justice, legal education, and the English legal system), a (part-time) legal practitioner, legal policy adviser, and a law reformer. He taught at the Universities of Bristol, Warwick, the London School of Economics, and Brunel University.

He was associated with a wide range of bodies and institutions including, at different stages in his career, and for different lengths of time: the Hillfields Advice Centre in Coventry; the Legal Action Group; the Training Committee of the Institute of Housing; the Management Committees of Citizens' Advice Bureaux in Coventry, Paddington, and Uxbridge; the Education Committee of the Law Society; the Lord Chancellor's Advisory Committee on Legal Aid; the Independent Tribunal Service for Social Security Appeal Tribunals; the Judicial Studies Board (both the main Board and its Tribunals Committee); the Council on Tribunals; the Civil Justice Council (and its sub-committee on Alternative Dispute Resolution); the Committee of Heads of University Law schools; the Socio-Legal Studies Association; and the Socio-Legal Research Users' Forum.

For a number of years he was Training Adviser to the then President of Social Security Appeal Tribunals and also sat as a part-time Social Security Tribunals chairman.

He acted as an expert adviser to the Council of Europe, examining Alternatives to Litigation in Disputes between the Individual and the State. In May 2000, he was appointed expert consultee to the Review of Tribunals, set up by the Lord Chancellor and chaired by Sir Andrew Leggatt. He was a member of the Gaymer Review of Industrial Tribunals, 2002.

From 2001 to 2005, he was a Law Commissioner for England and Wales; he was retained as a Special Consultant to the Commission from 2006 to 2008.

He is currently a member of the Executive Board of JUSTICE and of the Civil Justice Council working party on housing dispute resolution. He chairs the Board of the Dispute Service, a company under contract with government to provide tenancy deposit protection and dispute resolution.

Honours In 2002 he was appointed CBE; in 2006 he was elected as a Bencher of Middle Temple; in 2008 he was appointed QC (Hon). In 2015 he was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, and awarded the Socio-Legal Studies Association's prize for Contributions to the Socio-Legal Community.