The sports lawyer nobody sends a thank-you card
Every era of sport gets the villain it deserves, and for a decade of gender-eligibility wars the casting has barely changed: a softly-spoken commercial litigator in a London office who keeps winning. His name is Jonathan Taylor KC, he is a partner at Bird & Bird, and a new book reveals he has been called “a monster” and, one suspects, his favourite, “the darkest of dark lawyers.”
As The Times‘ Martyn Ziegler reported on 26 June, Taylor has now done the one thing dark lawyers aren’t supposed to: written it all down. Fair Play: Fighting to Protect the Spirit of Sport is part memoir, part case file, part justification.
And what a file. Taylor acted for World Athletics in the Caster Semenya (pictured below) case and won. He acted for the International Cricket Council in the 2010 Pakistan spot-fixing scandal, the World Anti-Doping Agency through Russia’s state-sponsored doping saga, and World Athletics again against Paralympic sprinter Blake Leeper, (pictured) whose blades were ruled an unfair advantage.
A legal publication has to be more careful than a back page, though. Semenya is not a transgender athlete she is a woman with differences of sexual development (DSD), required to suppress her natural testosterone to compete.
Taylor’s 2019 win at the Court of Arbitration for Sport became the scaffolding later borrowed and hardened into the transgender bans now sweeping female sport. That is what The Times means by “first step” accurate as cause and effect, sloppy as category.
Nor did Semenya get away clean. In July 2025 the ECtHR Grand Chamber found in her favour but only on procedure, ruling Switzerland denied her a fair hearing.
Her substantive claims were dismissed on jurisdiction, the DSD Regulations survived, and Taylor’s Bird & Bird team intervened even at that final stage.
The book’s gut-punch is the human cost. Taylor says Semenya told him to “cut his tongue out.”
It is the rare integrity lawyer willing to admit in print that the spirit-of-sport crusade comes with a personal invoice and that the loathing governing bodies prefer to outsource lands on the litigator, not the institution.
It arrives into settled, contested weather: the For Women Scotland ruling that “woman” means biological sex, IOC gene-screening for 2028, and ADF International’s legal notices to ten UK sports bodies.
