Justin Lockhart Simon’s story does not begin in Antigua. It begins in a Caribbean that still moved as one.

He was educated in Dominica, attending St Mary’s Academy, where he was elected Head Boy in 1968. Those formative years gave him discipline, confidence, and a regional outlook that would later define his public life. His family was already part of Antigua’s institutional fabric. His grandfather, Randall H. Lockhart, had been transferred to Antigua as Crown Counsel during the era when Dominica formed part of the Leeward Islands, and public servants, teachers, and lawyers moved freely across the chain. His mother trained at Spring Gardens Teachers’ Training College on St John’s Street, another thread binding the family to Antiguan civic life.

It was an era of Caribbean circulation, when the Leeward Islands functioned as a shared civic space. Simon’s identity was formed in that fluid regional world.

After completing his legal studies at the University of the West Indies and the Sir Hugh Wooding Law School, Simon did not drift into Antigua. He was summoned into it. As he recalls:

“I came here on the invitation of my uncle, Louis H. Lockhart, himself an attorney-at-law, after graduating from Hugh Wooding Law School, and I was called to the Antigua and Barbuda Bar in November 1975.”

That moment marked not just a relocation, but a transfer of responsibility. Simon entered Antiguan legal life as part of a lineage already committed to public service.

Over the decades that followed, Simon built one of the Caribbean’s most formidable legal practices, covering corporate, banking, employment, real property, administrative and constitutional law, revenue law, and civil litigation. He was called to the Bar in multiple Caribbean jurisdictions (Anguilla, Dominica, Montserrat, St Kitts and Nevis, and St Vincent and the Grenadines) and appeared successfully before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, placing him among the region’s most accomplished advocates.

Beyond private practice, Simon has repeatedly stepped into roles that shape how justice functions in Antigua and Barbuda and across the region. He has served as:

• President of the Antigua and Barbuda Bar Association, overseeing the drafting of its Constitution
• Treasurer of the OECS Bar Association
• Company Secretary of LIAT (1974) Ltd.
• Secretary to the National Recovery Task Force after Hurricane Luis (1995)
• Senator of Junior Chamber International (JCI)

Among his defining contributions was the intersection of law and governance. In 2004, Simon became Attorney General and Minister of Justice and Legal Affairs, a role he would hold for a decade. Antigua and Barbuda was no longer simply governing itself. It was being measured against global standards of financial regulation, transparency, and institutional credibility.

In response, Simon led what became known as the Trilogy of Governance Reform, three laws designed to fundamentally change how public power was exercised:

• The Integrity in Public Life Act (2004)
• The Prevention of Corruption Act (2004)
• The Freedom of Information Act (2004)

Together, they aimed to place public officials under enforceable scrutiny, criminalise corruption, and give citizens a legal right to information about the state. It was an attempt to move Antigua and Barbuda from political culture to institutional accountability.

Though the full architecture of this trilogy has never been activated as originally intended, it remains one of the most ambitious transparency frameworks ever enacted in the country. Even today, it stands as a blueprint for what modern governance could look like if fully applied.

After leaving Cabinet, Simon did not retreat. He turned instead to one of the most important questions of Caribbean sovereignty: Who should be our final court? In 2018, he became a leading public advocate for Antigua and Barbuda’s accession to the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ), arguing that judicial independence was inseparable from political independence.

That philosophy carried him into regional leadership in September 2025, when he was appointed Commissioner of the Regional Judicial and Legal Services Commission, the body responsible for selecting judges of the CCJ and the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court.

In December 2025, he was also appointed Deputy Chairman of Antigua and Barbuda’s Constitution Review Committee, placing him once again at the centre of how the nation defines itself.

Simon continues to make himself available to the media and the public, believing that law must never become the private language of elites. He has become a trusted interpreter of legal complexity in moments when national clarity matters most.

Time Capsule Reflection

Justin Lockhart Simon KC represents a generation of Caribbean leaders shaped by movement, education, and responsibility. From a Dominican schoolyard to Antiguan courtrooms, from Cabinet chambers to the CCJ’s gatekeeping body, his life traces the journey of a region learning how to govern itself.

He did not merely practice law; he helped build the nation that law must serve.