Satnam Singh Choongh
Clinical Professor of Legal Writing and Research
Affiliation: NYU Abu Dhabi
Education: LLB (Warwick); DPhil (Oxon); Barrister-at-Law
Research Areas: Planning and Environmental Law; Legal Writing and Research
Satnam Choongh holds a First Class Honours Degree in Law from the University of Warwick, and a DPhil from Trinity College, Oxford. He was appointed Hardwicke Scholar and awarded the Thomas More Bursary by Lincoln's Inn in 1993, and called to the Bar of England Wales in 1994. He dual-qualified as a solicitor in 1998, but has remained as a practicing barrister for the last 30 years specializing in all aspects of Planning and Environmental Law.
Choongh's research initially focused on criminal justice, in which he published widely (Policing as Social Discipline (OUP 1997); Improving Custodial Legal Advice (Law Society 1998); Ethnic Minority Defendants and the Right to Elect Jury Trial (Commission for Racial Equality 2000); Criminal Justice in China: An Empirical Study (co-authored) (Edward Elgar 2011). More recently, he has published in his specialized field as a Planning and Environmental barrister (The Element of Discretion in the Context of an Up-to-Date Plan: Implications of the Barwood Case (JPL 2018); Planning Units, New Chapters in Planning History and Inconsistent Permissions (JPL 2009); Development in Breach of Conditions Precedent: When is it Lawful (JPL 2007); Finding a Workable Definition of Waste: Is it a Waste of Time? (JPL 2006). Future research and publications will concentrate on Comparative Urban Planning and Environmental law, as well as continuing to publish in the field of Legal Writing and Research (Doing Ethnographic Research: Lessons from a Case Study (Edin.UP 2017).
Choongh was Socio-Legal Research Fellow at Warwick University, and has held Professorial Posts at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the University of Birmingham (where he was founder and Director of the Centre for Employability Professional Legal Education and Research).