Newcastle University

Background

His Honour Judge Abbas Mithani QC is a Circuit Judge assigned to the Midlands Circuit. He is a QC, honoris causa, which was awarded to him in March 2009 in recognition of the substantial contribution he had made to the development of Succession, Company and Insolvency Law and for his academic work.
In addition to his judicial appointment, Judge Mithani is also closely involved with several UK Universities reflecting his position as the leading authority on company and insolvency law in the UK. In 2000, he was appointed an Honorary Professor of Law at the University of Birmingham in 2000. He is also a Visiting Professor and member of the Court of Newcastle University, from where he graduated in 1978, and a Visiting Professor of Law at Kingston University’s Law School. Until July 2006, Judge Mithani was also a Deputy Bankruptcy Registrar.
Before he was elevated to the Bench, Judge Mithani was a solicitor. His principal areas of work were company, commercial, commercial litigation and insolvency. He was involved in a number of leading cases in those areas. He was a Licensed Insolvency Practitioner, a Fellow (or member) of the Insolvency Practitioners’ Association, Society of Practitioners of Insolvency and the Insolvency lawyers’ Association and also a Higher Court Civil Advocate.
Throughout his professional career Judge Mithani has written numerous articles for leading journals on commercial litigation, insolvency and directors' duties. In 1994, he wrote his first book on “Islamic Wills” explaining the inter-action of the English Law of Succession with the principles of the Islamic Law of Inheritance. Judge Mithani is the general editor of the leading work on the disqualification of company directors (published as a second edition in loose-leaf form by LexisNexis/Butterworths in 1998) entitled Mithani: Directors’ Disqualification. He has also contributed to a number of other LexisNexis/Butterworths practitioner- works, such as the Encyclopaedia of Forms and Precedents, Atkin’s Court Forms and Kelly’s Draftsman and to the ‘Brown Book’, published by Jordans, a practitioner-work on the Civil Procedure Rules introduced as a result of the implementation of the ‘Woolf’ reforms in 1999. He was also a member of the Insolvency Rules Committee from 2001 to 2003.
In January 2003, Judge Mithani was awarded the first ever ‘Asian Jewel Award for Legal Excellence’ for Central Britain, sponsored by the West Midlands Police. In March 2009, he was awarded the ‘Lifetime Achievement Award’ by the Society of Asian Lawyers.