Research
Our department brings world-leading expertise in law and social justice. Our staff are at the forefront of research in socio-legal studies, feminist legal studies, family justice, criminal justice, reproductive rights, international law, law and political economy, taxation law, legal theory, and private law.
We bring a critical approach to researching law’s effects on people, communities and cultures. Our findings shape academic knowledge and legal reform both within the United Kingdom and internationally.
Our transformative socio-legal research leads academic debate and advances cutting-edge solutions to social and global problems.
We bring a wealth of experience and expertise in researching law’s effects on the everyday lives of people and communities. We are renowned for advancing interdisciplinarity, animating and deepening traditional legal research with methods and perspectives from sociology, criminology, history, political economy, environmental studies and anthropology.
Our approach to law is critical, meaning that we focus on situating law and legal reform within a wider social and political analysis. We combine attention to the letter of the law with awareness of law’s role in perpetuating inequalities or challenging oppression.
Our research has been funded by the Economic & Social Research Council, the Arts & Humanities Research Council, the Leverhulme Trust, the British Academy, the Home Office, the Ministry of Justice, and many other bodies. Our staff have been recognised with research awards from the Socio-Legal Studies Association and the Leverhulme Trust and honoured with appointment to the Academy of Social Sciences.
Staff are regularly invited to speak at international conferences and we sit on the editorial boards of leading law and interdisciplinary journals.
Visit the School website to find out more about wider research across the School’s research challenges.
Research projects
A Day at a Time
Professor Emily Grabham is co-founder of the interdisciplinary A Day at a Time project which explores how people experienced, made and re-made time during the early Covid-19 pandemic. Funded by the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust, and collaborating with Mass Observation, research on this project has traced the fissured futures and ruptured rhythms of pandemic time and analysed how people developed ‘tactics of anticipation’ to orient themselves in relation to changing laws and rules. Ongoing research explores the role of fate and memory in people’s everyday legal consciousness during the pandemic.
School Research challenges: Dimensions of inequality; Hidden voices, contested pasts.
Public Consultation and Local Democracy in Re-naming Processes
Dr Emily Haslam’s research explores processes of remembering and forgetting in international law, with a focus on the slave trade. She is currently exploring (with Suhraiya Jivraj, University of Kent) the role law plays in (dis)enabling transformative debate about the memorialisation of controversial historical figures in the built environment. Funded by a BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grant, this project considers how councils across the UK are responding to calls to re-name streets and other sites in order to consider the extent to which legal and administrative processes do, and might, contribute to transformative understandings of contested histories.
School Research challenges: Challenges to democracy and the public sphere; Hidden voices, contested pasts.
Feminist Judgments
Professor Rosemary Hunter is one of the founders of the transnational feminist judgment projects, in which feminist scholars and activists rewrite court judgments from the position of an imagined feminist judge sitting alongside the original judges in the case. These judgments highlight the choices available to judges and the contingency of legal decision-making by demonstrating that even at the same time, with the same law and information available to the court, and subject to the same constraints of authority and form, cases could have been reasoned or decided differently. In doing so, they expose the biases and exclusions inherent in judicial decisions while showing how law might become more inclusive of traditionally marginalised or silenced voices. Professor Hunter’s co-edited book, Feminist Judgments: From Theory to Practice (2010), focused on England and Wales, was followed by a series of projects in other countries and jurisdictions. Her ongoing work includes acting as adviser to the Central and Eastern European Feminist Judgments Project, and co-editing a special issue of the Griffith Law Review following from the Vietnamese Feminist Judgments Project.
School research challenge: Dimensions of inequality
Equity, Trust and Modern Society
Nick Piška is currently completing a book on the fate of the jurisdiction of equity in modern law, to be published with Hart Publishing. The project considers equity’s contributions to the legal architecture of capitalism, including the transformations in the use and nature of trusts and equity’s governance structures such as fiduciary obligations, and asks how equity and trusts law produces and sustains economic and social inequalities.
School research challenge: Dimensions of inequality
Social Reproduction and Gender Equitable Value Chains
Professor Donatella Alessandrini’s research explores how global value chain (GVC) regulation interacts with women’s working, living and environmental conditions, impacting on both their productive and reproductive labour. It aims to contribute to debates about the gender equality potential of women’s participation in GVCs increasingly supported by national governments and international institutions. It follows British Academy-funded research which – drawing on third world approaches to international law, critical studies of value and valuation, and feminist political economy – has provided a sustained legal analysis of the contribution international economic law has made to the proliferation of GVCs and to the unequal distribution of economic rewards along these chains.
School research challenge: Dimensions of inequality
Global Production and the International Corporate Tax System
Dr Clair Quentin is working on the structural relation between the profits of multinational corporations (which arise from global production) and the power to tax that profit (which is shared between countries). It is said that multinationals should be taxed "where value is created", and there exists a widespread perception that the countries that are losing out when multinationals avoid tax are the countries into which they make sales, i.e. predominantly the wealthy countries of the Global North. Dr Quentin's research pursues alternative analyses which show that the value is not created where sales are made but, rather, upstream in global value chains where the labour is performed; often hyperexploited labour in Global South countries.
School research challenge: Dimensions of inequality
Responding to Domestic Abuse – The Family Justice System
Professor Mandy Burton’s research examines the legal responses to domestic abuse, with a particular focus on criminal justice and family justice. Alongside Professor Rosemary Hunter, she was one of three academic members of the ‘Harm Panel’ (Ministry of Justice, 2020), reporting on how allegations of domestic abuse are dealt with in family law cases relating to child arrangements. The report documents barriers to safe processes and outcomes, which interact with other factors, such as ethnicity and social class. The fundamental reforms recommended by the Harm Panel were accepted in full by the government, including a recommendation for an ongoing review mechanism. Since the publication of the Panel’s report, she has been working with Professor Hunter and a team of researchers in the Office of the Domestic Abuse Commissioner on a pilot of a Family Court Reporting and Review Mechanism. A report on the mechanism and findings from the three pilot court sites will be published later in 2025.
School research challenge: Dimensions of inequality