Anthony Julius

Anthony Robert Julius (born 16 July 1956) is a British solicitor advocate known for being Diana, Princess of Wales' divorce lawyer^[1] and for representing Deborah Lipstadt.^[2] He is the deputy chairman at the law firm Mishcon de Reya^[1] and honorary solicitor to Foundation for Jewish Heritage. He is a trustee for the Institute of Jewish Studies.

He holds the chair in Law and Arts in the Faculty of Laws at University College London^[3] and teaches courses on Shakespeare, Kant, and William Empson. He is also a visiting professor to the Haifa university.^[4]

Life

The son of a

Julius is legal advisor to the Foundation of Jewish Heritage.[10]

Julius is an advisory editor at the current affairs journal

From 1996 to 1998 he was a part-time lecturer at the Law Faculty of University College London. In 2017 he rejoined University College London as the inaugural chair in Law and the Arts.^[3] He was previously chairman of the London Consortium and visiting professor at Birkbeck, University of London.

He serves as trustee to English PEN, the founding centre of a worldwide writers' association.^[13] Julius is also chairman of the trustees of Phenomen Trust.

Between 2007 and 2013, Julius played an active role in the campaign against the academic boycott of Israeli universities. In a Guardian article co-authored with historian Simon Schama, Julius wrote "This is not the first boycott call directed at Jews. On 1 April 1933, a week after he came to power, Hitler ordered a boycott of Jewish shops, banks, offices and department stores."^[14]

Julius's other activities in this context included representing Ronnie Fraser in an action against the University and College Union (UCU). Fraser, who was a member of the union, complained that it had created an "intimidating", "hostile", "humiliating", and "offensive" environment for Jews.^[15] After a 20-day hearing the tribunal rejected his claim, harshly rebuking Julius for "misusing the legal process". Scorn is also invoked for Julius's decision to pursue certain points, with complaints variously dismissed as "palpably groundless", "obviously hopeless" and "devoid of any merit".^[16][1] The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), which critics have described as an ‘extreme Israel advocacy group’,^[17] criticized the rejection.^[18][19]

Private life

He married Judith Bernie in 1979; the couple had four children, but later divorced. In 1999, he married Dina Rabinovitch and had one child with her. Rabinovitch died in 2007 from breast cancer. In 2009, he married Katarina Lester, and is step-father to her two children. They had a son together in 2011.^[20]

Selected publications

• T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form (1st edition Cambridge University Press 1995, 2nd edition Thames & Hudson 2003), based on his PhD thesis
• Idolising Pictures (Thames & Hudson 2000).
• Transgressions: The Offences of Art (Thames & Hudson 2002).
• "Dickens the lawbreaker" in Critical Quarterly (John Wiley & Sons, 2003)
• "Love Poetry and the Art of Advocacy" in Critical Quarterly (
  John Wiley & Sons
  , 2003)
• "Art Crimes", in Law and Literature (Oxford University Press 1999) and in Dear Images: Art, Copyright and Culture (Ridinghouse 2003).
• ISBN 978-0-19-929705-4
  .
• Bentham and the Arts – co-editor, and contributor ("More Bentham, Less Mill")
• Whither liberal Zionism?
• The Rebirth of Antisemitism in the 21st Century: From the Academic Boycott Campaign into the Mainstream Contributor - (Studies in Contemporary Antisemitism)
• "Psychoanalysis and Free Speech," Ernest Jones Memorial Lecture, 2023. British Psychoanalytic Society.
• "Abraham: The First Jew" – a volume in the Yale Jewish Lives Series, to be published in Winter 2024; (3) Shameless Authors – a study of censorship of the arts - to be published by OUP in 2026.