Palley was born in South Africa in 1931, into a Jewish family. Her father Arthur Aubrey Swait was born in England in 1895. He served in the First World War as a cyclist before being commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Royal Flying Corps. He emigrated to South Africa and married Cecile Audrey Nathan in Johannesburg in December 1929; she was the daughter of the jurist Manfred Nathan. She had one younger sister, Anne Christine, who later, as Anne Routier, became a National Party Member of Parliament in South Africa, and also served on the Constitution Commission and the South African Human Rights Commission. She grew up in Durban, and attended Durban Girls' College. She then started to study microbiology at the University of Cape Town, but switching to study law in her first year. She graduated with a BA and an LLB. She married Ahrn Palley in 1952; he was some 17 years older, and had qualified as a medical doctor before retraining as a lawyer as a mature student at the University of Cape Town. They opposed apartheid, and moved to Southern Rhodesia in the late 1950s. Ahrn Palley was elected as an MP in Southern Rhodesia in 1958 for the opposition Dominion Party. He became an Independent, and was reelected in 1962 as the only Independent. He opposed the white-led Rhodesian government from 1962 to 1970, and opposed Rhodesia's Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965. The Palleys had five sons. The couple divorced in 1985.
Academic career
While living in Southern Rhodesia, and after starting her family, Palley started to write for the Central African Examiner and other magazines. She became a lecturer at the University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland from 1959, which taught University of London degrees, and she helped to establish a law school there. She also studied for a doctorate while teaching and raising her young family; she received a PhD from the University of London in 1965, and published a book based on her PhD thesis, The Constitutional History and Law of Southern Rhodesia 1888 to 1964, in 1966. She became an Advocate in South Africa and Rhodesia, and was called to the Bar in England at Middle Temple. Palley's husband encouraged her to move with the children to the UK, to escape the hostile political regime and social ostracism in Southern Rhodesia. She was appointed as a lecturer in law at Queen's University Belfast in 1965, became a reader in 1967, and was appointed professor of public law in 1970. At the time, according to the 1970 Commonwealth Universities Yearbook, there were 430 men in full-time and 77 in part-time university positions, but 41 full-time and 3 part-time women; 10 out of 32 law schools teaching to degree level had no female academic staff; in 1971 there were only four other women teaching law at universities above lecturer level: two readers and senior lecturers. Palley was Dean of the Faculty of Law at Queen's University Belfast from 1971 to 1973. She then moved to become professor of law at the University of Kent at Canterbury from 1973 to 1984, and was master of Darwin College, Kent from 1974 to 1982. She was Principal of St Anne's College, Oxford, from 1984 to 1991. The Claire Palley Building at St Anne's College, completed in 1992, was named in her honour. She was awarded the OBE in 1998, and received an honorary LLD from Queen's University Belfast in 1991.
Palley’s life is characterised by an enduring commitment to human rights and the rule of law. It is her determination and success which led her to deliver the prestigious Hamlyn Lectures in 1990, where she put forward a strong argument for widespread education in human rights. In 1978, she devoted her book, Constitutional Law and Minorities, to a philosophical and practical response to the complex issues surrounding the protection of human rights.
