Good Law Project and Dr Jason Arday

If you do the work we do then being criticised by your enemies comes with the territory - indeed, it’s the most reliable sign of that work succeeding - but when your friends criticise you it’s worth taking note. And we do have friends criticising us for our decision to carry - a deliberately neutral verb - an open letter in support of Dr Arday.

I’m writing this piece to respond to them.

Forgive me for clearing away some undergrowth before I get to the points I want to make but it might help contextualise what I don’t want to talk about - which is anything that apportions blame in this story between the individuals who sought to defend Dr Arday. The forces arrayed against Black and Brown people in Britain are enormously powerful. Standing together, in public at least, with people who want the same things as you do is a pretty central part of how I think you resist.

I need to address why I am writing this on my rather dusty personal substack. The decisions an organisation (Good Law Project now has about forty staff) makes attach to the leader’s name. You get credit you don’t deserve for the hard work of your colleagues and you get blame you don’t deserve too. But I want to be really clear that the decision to carry the open letter was mine.

We also know that Dr Arday is profoundly neurodivergent. It’s not for me, as a non-expert, to talk about how that has contributed to his errors but I rather wish it had been properly addressed, by those with no axe to grind, in the reporting of this story.

What role did Good Law Project play?

The BBC has asserted Good Law Project publicly represented Arday during the plagiarism row. We and I played a few roles.

I was asked by a senior Black member of the academic community (not Dr Arday for the avoidance of doubt) whether we would carry their open letter in support of Dr Arday - and we agreed. I put the letter before some others who agreed to sign it.

I spoke to Dr Arday on a number of occasions about how to deal, especially at a personal level, with a media firestorm that caused some of the other signatories to fear for his life. I have some experience of dealing with these things myself

And when Dr Arday decided to resign we were asked to publish his resignation letter. That speaks, in particular, to the fact that there were no mainstream media outlets that he trusted. Obviously I said yes.

We haven’t represented him in any broader sense than this.

Why did we carry the open letter?

We decided to publish the letter on 26 July 2026. At this point in time what we knew was that the racist and eugenicist Nathan Cofnas was alleging Dr Arday’s plagiarism, the Telegraph was amplifying points Cofnas had made about plagiarism; and the Times Higher Education Supplement had been approached to run the story and decided not to. We also knew that Cambridge University had issued an astonishingly strong statement that:

“Professor Arday has been the victim of a vile campaign to undermine his credibility, which must stop. Allegations of plagiarism regarding his thesis and journal publications have been thoroughly investigated by the relevant institution and the journals in question. Professor Arday has been cleared by those investigations of any wrongdoing.”

Personally, I felt able to rely on the statement by Cambridge University. I knew that a number of senior Black leaders wanted to put their names to a statement. And I was aware that allegations of plagiarism were routinely used to try and undermine Black academics in the United States and I saw this as part of the same playbook.

But that was then. Do I agree now that the plagiarism claims are well founded?

In short, no.

Liverpool John Moores University investigated those claims and rejected them: it concluded he had made “honest and reasonable error[s],” accepted there were failures in the quality of supervision he had received which had contributed to those errors and referred to his explicit acknowledgment of the work of Dr Zwozdiak-Myers in his thesis which was inconsistent with the charge of plagiarism.

I am not aware of any neutral investigations that have concluded he was a plagiarist.

None of this is to say that I disagree with the suggestion made by academics who had no axe to grind that there was a prima facie case for a further investigation. They are academics and I am not.

What about the remainder of the claims against Dr Arday?

The focus of the open letter Good Law Project carried was the plagiarism claim, which I have addressed above. But what about the other claims: that Dr Arday made things up?

Some of those claims were plainly false. For example, The Telegraph initially asserted that Dr Arday had falsely claimed to be a professional athlete. It then quietly withdrew those assertions on learning that Dr Arday had not in fact made those claims: in fact they had been made by others on his behalf.

It’s a pity that The Telegraph did not publicly acknowledge that it had made false claims - especially in circumstances where the subject of its story was Dr Arday making false claims. But one of the privileges of being white is that you don’t get scrutinised as much and so get away with more.

That having been said, I have not investigated most of the allegations made by Dr Arday. It is expedient for me to say, but it is also true for me to say, that: I only last night returned from ‘holiday’. I am sure that many journalists - and friends of mine - are acting in good faith when describing him as a ‘fantasist’ or words to that effect. For myself, as someone who has spoken at length to Dr Arday, I remain uncomfortable with that description but I do not have the expertise to speculate on what effects his neurodivergence may have had on how he spoke.