Career
In the 1960s, she worked as a journalist in the United States, following the campaign of Martin Luther King. Married, she returned to Britain in 1970 with her husband and first son, Nicholas, and undertook a postgraduate law degree at the London School of Economics. In 1974 she joined the firm of the radical solicitor Benedict Birnberg as a trainee, being admitted to the Roll of Solicitors on 15 December 1978. Following Birnberg's retirement in 1999, she continued to work as a senior partner of Birnberg Peirce and Partners.
In the mid-1970s Peirce supported specific campaigns for reform of laws and police procedures that permitted the prosecution and conviction of persons solely on identification evidence. Individual cases then very much in the news, such as the George Davis Is Innocent campaign and numerous others, led to the establishment of Justice Against the Identification Laws (JAIL), an organisation that Peirce supports. During her career she has represented Judith Ward, a woman wrongfully convicted in 1974 of several IRA-related bombings, the Guildford Four, the Birmingham Six, the family of Jean Charles de Menezes and Moazzam Begg, a man held in extrajudicial detention by the American government. In 2011, Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, appointed Peirce as his solicitor in Swedish Judicial Authority v Julian Assange.
Read more about this topic: Gareth Peirce
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