Dr Jonathan Rogers

I wrote my doctorate at UCL on the subject of exculpatory defences in criminal law, and then started my academic career at Brunel University (2000) before moving to UCL as a lecturer in 2002. I left UCL, as an Associate Professor in Criminal Justice, in 2018 to take up my present position at Cambridge. During the end of my time at UCL, I won the prize for best teacher, as voted by the students (2015), directed the Centre of Criminal Law and joined the Editorial Board of the Criminal Law Review.

My research is largely doctrinal in nature, but I also strongly believe in the value of engaging practitioners and the wider community as well as legal scholars. To that end, I co-direct a new network of some 150 scholars and practitioners, Criminal Law Reform Now, which aims to set up project teams to consider contemporary problems which may require reform and to seek ways to bring them to the attention of policymakers. In 2018 we received AHRC funding in order to research reform to the Computer Misuse Act 1990, especially as it applies to testing and correcting vulnerabilities on websites, and we launched our report in the House of Commons in January 2020. In January 2023 we launched our report on the effect of deception in sexual offences. This included ten short pieces by leading academic writers and our own proposal for a new offence of obtaining sexual activity by deception. In 2024 we agreed a memorandum of understanding with the Law Commission (the first external body to so) and as part of that agreement we recently (2025) submitted a scoping paper on internal co-operation with other law enforcement agencies. I myself lead our project on the regulation of private prosecutions, which has prompted the Ministry of Justice to consult widely on the merits of accreditation for companies who prosecute, and we expect to publish our report later in 2025.

In terms of academic contributions to the literature, my ideas have included the following:

• that where the conduct of an accused person engages a Convention right under Articles 8-11, a fact-sensitive approach to the proportionality of conviction should generally be required (“Prosecutors, Courts and Conduct of the Accused which Engages a Qualified Convention Right” (2005) 58 Current Legal Problems 101-132). This was sixteen years before this matter became a hotly contested legal topic in asries of cases concerning offences committed in the course of public protests, following the Supreme Court decision in DPP v Ziegler [2021] UKSC 23.
• that the public interest element in bringing prosecutions depends upon a judgement whether the aim of seeking punishment of the accused justified the costs of prosecutions, in which respect an important distinction must be drawn between the harms of punishment and the harms of prosecution ("Restructuring the Exercise of Prosecutorial Discretion in England” 26(4) (2006) Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 775-803).
• that the relatively high threshold of the evidential test for bringing prosecutions might only (properly) be said to comply with the doctrine of positive obligations in human rights law if the Victims Right to Review can be shown to be properly robust (“A Human Rights Perspective on the Evidential Test for bringing Prosecutions” [2017] Crim.L.R. 680-697).
• that the doctrine of positive obligations should only rarely affect English criminal law, although it may have consequences for the responsibilities of judges and juries, and that the law of self-defence rather needs to be adapted to consider underlying reasons why mistakes might be made and the possibility that a perceived lack of accountability may be linked to some arguably excessive uses of force (respectively, "Applying the Doctrine of Positive Obligations in the European Convention of Human Rights to Domestic Substantive Criminal Law in Domestic Proceedings” [2003] Crim. L.R. 690-712, “A Criminal Lawyer’s Response to Chastisement in the European Court of Human Rights”, [2002] Crim.L.R. 98-113, and “Culpability in Self-Defence and Crime Prevention” in Seeking Security (Hart 2012) (eds. G R Sullivan & I H Dennis) 265-292.
• that "second limb" abuse of process (enabling the stay of trials where the it offends the court's sense of justice and propriety to try the accused) should not extend to police misconduct purely at the investigatory stage but should be confined to its original scope. This is best understood as applying when continuance of the trial would represent an ongoing breach of an identified procedural right of the accused which cannot properly be cured in another way (“Reclaiming the Essence of ‘second limb’ Abuse of Process” [2022] Crim.L.R. 659-678).