1 Last checked 2 October 2020.

Jonathan joined Huddersfield University in September 2018, and is a Senior Lecturer in the Law School. He is module leader for Immigration and Asylum Law LLB, Law in Society LLB, and additionally teaches Public Law LLB.

Jonathan is the Book Review Editor for the Journal of Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Law.

He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and is interested in assessment literacy. He has experience mentoring students through schemes for widening participation in Higher Education, and in teaching pedagogy and teaching skills to postgraduate students who are embarking on HE teaching for the first time.

Jonathan worked as a caseworker in a well respected legal aid firm of solicitors in Birmingham, working exclusively in the area of asylum and immigration law. His practice included the representation of some of the most marginalised migrant groups, including asylum applicants and foreign national offenders. He developed expertise in asylum claims based on LGBTQ+ identity and on the Refugee Convention ground of religion.

Jonathan's research interests are primarily in immigration law, and his research and writing are informed by the methodologies of human rights law and administrative law. He is also interested in issues related to citizenship, identity and exclusion.

His research articles to date have appeared in a number of prestigious law journals and are concerned with the best interests of the child and the deportation of foreign national offenders. His articles often develop practical policy or legal responses which would make the best interests of the child realisable, actionable, and operational.

Jonathan’s research interests in the best interests of the child led him to be invited to conduct a literature review for NGO defenddigitalme about how the best interests of the child is understood in the context of children’s digital rights. This has also led to a co-authored report with key questions for the Information Commissioner’s Office on the operationalisation of the Age Appropriate Design Code (https://tinyurl.com/3n5xpxcr).

His peer-reviewed articles variously:

• (with Professor John Eekelaar, University of Oxford) explore the legal and ethical case for exempting from deportation those who arrive in the UK as children (JIANL, 2021)
• suggest an innovative policy solution to hard cases in deportation law (Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 2020);
• consider how to reposition children to be at the heart of deportation decisions in human rights cases (Netherlands Quarterly on Human Rights, 2020);
• systematise the Strasbourg case law on Article 8 ECHR in deportation cases (Human Rights Law Review, 2020);
• investigate barriers to children's access to justice in immigration appeal proceedings (Public Law, 2017), and;
• critique prevailing interpretations of the deportation provisions in the Immigration Act 2014 (JIANL, 2017 & 2019). 

Jonathan worked collaboratively with Law School colleague Gemma Manning to respond together to the 2019 Law Commission's consultation on the simplification of the Immigration Rules (https://tinyurl.com/r3wjfex). Together we published an article in Judicial Review which investigated some of the underlying assumptions in the Law Commission's consultation document, and we responded to the Commission's final report in the UK Administrative Justice Institute blog (https://tinyurl.com/szvx96z). On the same blog, Jonathan also responded to the Government's response (https://tinyurl.com/y8c7voew), and interrogated whether the Law Commission's recommendations were carried out in the post-Brexit Immigration Rules (https://tinyurl.com/y3yvu42h).