Helen Mountfield KC 

Helen Mountfield KC is a barrister, founder member of Matrix Chambers, and the Principal of Mansfield College, Oxford. She studied Modern History at Magdalen from 1986-1989. Helen is a well-known specialist in constitutional law, human rights, and equality law, with particular experience in the education sector, who has appeared in many significant cases in the Supreme Court, Privy Council European Court of Justice, and European Court of Human Rights, and has given evidence to a number of parliamentary Select Committees on human rights law, election law, and constitutional law.

She was a recorder on the Midlands Circuit and deputy judge of the High Court and is now a judge of the Courts of Appeal of Jersey and Guernsey and the Qatar International Commercial District Court. She is also a Master of the Bench of Gray’s Inn and features on the ‘First Hundred Years’ website which celebrates the history of women in law. 

Helen is a trustee of Index on Censorship and an Ambassador for Frontline Aids. She co-chaired the Independent Commission on the Future of Work with Lord Watson in 2016-2017; was an advisor to Lord Hodgson’s Review of the Transparency of Lobbying Act Review in 2016, and was a member of the Royal Society of Arts’ Commission on Drugs Policy. She has served as a trustee of a number of charities, including the Equal Rights Trust, the Institute for the Future of Work, the National Campaign for the Arts, Birthrights, and as a school governor.

Helen matriculated at Magdalen in 1986.