Our alumni

Michael Mansfield QC, the UK's most prominent and high-profile defence lawyer, and one of Keele’s most famous alumni, studied philosophy under Antony Flew in the 1960s.

In a long and distinguished career, some of Mansfield’s most prominent cases included representing those wrongly convicted of the IRA's Guildford and Birmingham pub bombings, those involved in the Israeli Embassy bombing; Stephen Lawrence's family; Michael Barrymore at the Stuart Lubbock inquest; Barry George at the inquest into the death of Jill Dando; the Bloody Sunday families; Mohamed al-Fayed in the inquest into the deaths of his son Dodi al-Fayed and Diana, Princess of Wales; and the family of Jean Charles de Menezes.

In his biography, Memoirs of a Radical Lawyer, he recalls that ‘at the end of my final year Professor Flew told me, a twinkle in his eye, that I had achieved a first-class grade in philosophy! Well, blow me down! Now it was time to concentrate on my ambition to begin a career in law.’