Emily Grabham joined Loughborough Law in January 2025 as a specialist in socio-legal studies and feminist legal theory. Prior to Loughborough, she was Professor of Law at the University of Kent. Emily studied law at Cambridge, followed by an LLM at Queen’s University Canada, an MSc in Gender, Society & Culture at Birkbeck, an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia, and a PhD in Law at the University of Kent. Before entering academia, Emily worked as an employment and human rights solicitor. Emily was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2020 for her research on the relationship between law, time and social justice. She is the previous recipient of the Socio-Legal Studies Association (SLSA) Legal Theory and History Book Prize for her monograph Brewing Legal Times (Toronto, 2016) and the SLSA Articles Prize for Time and Technique: The Legal Lives of the 26 Week Qualifying Period (Economy & Society, 2017). Emily is a Senior Advanced Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Legal Studies, University of London. She is a former lead editor and editorial board member of Feminist Legal Studies and a current member of the UKRI Talent Panel College and UKRI Future Leaders Fellowships Panel. Emily is a published writer, with two essays in the Dublin Review (2022, 2024). She sits on the advisory board for The Literary Consultancy, an Arts Council-funded writing support organisation.
Emily is a feminist legal scholar with a particular focus on the relationship between law and time. Her research employs qualitative methods from sociology and social anthropology to explore the everyday lives of law. Her monograph Brewing Legal Times: Things, Form, and the Enactment of Law (University of Toronto Press) explored how questions of time and materiality help us to understand law’s capacity to produce social injustice. With Dr Sian Beynon-Jone (sociology, York), she ran the international Regulating Time AHRC network. More recently, with colleagues from sociology, cultural studies, organisational studies and environmental philosophy, she co-founded the A Day At a Time project, which draws on Mass Observation accounts of the early Covid-19 pandemic to explore people’s everyday experiences of time. Emily’s research has been funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the Leverhulme Trust. Her work has been published in a range of interdisciplinary journals including Economy & Society, The Journal of Law & Society, Social & Legal Studies, Feminist Legal Studies, Body & Society, and Sexualities.
Emily is committed to exploring the power of creative writing in analysing and communicating law’s social effects. Her essays have been published in the Dublin Review (2022, 2024) and she holds an MFA in Creative Writing. Supported by a Philip Leverhulme Prize, Emily’s research develops arts and humanities led collaborations to explore the relationship between time, law and social justice.
Recent projects:
- A Day At A Time. British Academy and Leverhulme-funded project analysing Mass Observation accounts of the Covid-19 pandemic to understand the public’s everyday experience of time.
- The Future of Legal Gender. ESRC-funded project led by Professor Davina Cooper (King’s College London) exploring ways of reforming legal gender status.
Emily’s research led- undergraduate teaching includes Labour Law; Gender, Sexuality and Law; Public Law; and European Union Law. She also enjoys teaching Postgraduate Research Methods.
Books
- Women, Precarious Work and Care: The Failure of Family-Friendly Rights. Bristol University Press (Law, Society, Policy series).
- 2019. Law and Time. Routledge. Co-editor with Siân Beynon-Jones.
- Brewing Legal Times: Things, Form and the Enactment of Law. University of Toronto Press.
Articles
- ‘Affect, action, and incommensurability: Finding law and time in UK Mass Observation diarists’ accounts of the Covid-19 pandemic’ Juridikum (Austria’s critical law review; invited contribution to special issue on Time and Law) Vol 3 388-394 with Siân Beynon-Jones.
- ‘ ‘The rules are all over the place’: Mass Observation, time and law in the Covid-19 pandemic’. 50(3) Journal of Law & Society 369-391 with Siân Beynon-Jones and Nadine Hendrie.
- ‘Decertifying Gender: The Challenge of Equal Pay’. Feminist Legal Studies 31 67-93.
- ‘The Crafty Power of Text: Methods for a Sociology of Legislative Drafting.’ Journal of Law & Society 49 S1-S15.
- ‘Time and Technique: The Legal Lives of the 26 Week Qualifying Period’ Economy & Society 45 (3-4): 379-406.