Professor Mandy Burton

DPhil (Oxford University)

Pronouns: She/her
  • Professor of Law
Publications
ORCiD
Mandy Burton

Professor Mandy Burton’s research is in the fields of criminal law, criminal justice, family law and policy. In the field of criminal justice, she is particularly interested in victims’ rights, police and prosecution decision-making and criminal courts (including magistrates’ decision-making and jury trials). She has considerable experience in carrying out externally funded socio-legal research projects and has produced numerous research reports for UK government departments and other public bodies. Examples of her empirical work include a recent Home Office funded project on criminal case progression (see publications).  

Professor Burton is committed to research with impact beyond academia. Alongside Professor Rosemary Hunter, she was a member of the ‘Harm Panel’ and co-author of their report, Assessing the Risk of Harm to Children and Parents in Private Law Children Cases (Ministry of Justice, 2020).  Since the publication of the Harm Panel report, she has been worked with Professor Hunter and 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, Everyday Business, was published by the Domestic Abuse Commissioner in October 2025.

Much of Mandy’s research has examined the legal responses to domestic abuse, in relation to which she is author of two monographs published by Routledge- (2008) Legal Responses to Domestic Violence and (2022) Domestic Abuse, Victims and the Law, and co-editor of the international Research Handbook on Domestic Violence and Abuse (Edward Elgar, 2024).

Mandy is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA) and has more than two decades experience of teaching undergraduates and postgraduates on law and research degree programmes, having previously taught at the Universities of Manchester and Leicester. She is also a Level 5 qualified Professional Coach.

Professor Burton undertakes socio-legal feminist scholarship on gender-based violence. She has published on a variety of topics related to this, including: domestic abuse as a human rights issue, gendered defences to domestic homicide, addressing vulnerability in legal processes and court specialisation. She has written about the slow evolution of the understanding of ‘domestic abuse’ in the criminal law, with a focus on physical abuse and limited recognition of coercive controlling behaviour. Some of her recent articles (co-authored with Professors Bettinson and Munro) compare the approach of judges, police and prosecutors in Scotland and England and Wales to coercive control, both as an offence and defence.  

Mandy led a research team commissioned to research criminal case progression in of a large sample of rape, sexual assault and serious violence cases; one of the few studies of its kind in England and Wales (Burton et al (2012) Understanding the progression of serious cases through the Criminal Justice System (Ministry of Justice). She collaborated with researchers in the Department of Criminology at the University of Leicester on a similar study published in July 2025 (see publications-reports).

In the field of family justice, Mandy has carried out various projects, including policy facing reviews on civil law remedies for domestic abuse, the civil/criminal hybridisation of protective orders and the impact of domestic abuse in child arrangement cases. She has contributed to the development of practitioner responses to domestic abuse at both a local and national level as a member of several advisory and project groups. Notably, she was a member of the ‘Harm Panel’, as discussed in her main profile, and co-author of the Domestic Abuse Commissioner’s 2025 report, Everyday Business (see publications).

Professor Burton has more than two decades experience of teaching undergraduates on LLB programmes, specialising in:

  • Criminal Justice
  • Criminal Law
  • Family Law

Mandy has also taught research ethics and research methods to postgraduate students. She is the co-editor, with Professor Dawn Watkins, of Research Methods in Law, Third Edition (Routledge, 2025). 

Professor Burton has successfully supervised and examined PhD students on a variety of topics in the fields of criminal justice and family law, including:

  • The treatment of vulnerable and intimidated witnesses - Malaysia- A comparison with England and Wales
  • Jury trials – Canada
  • Divorce law reform – Malta
  • Sharenting and the protection of privacy

Books

  • Burton, M (2022) Domestic Abuse, Victims and the Law (Routledge).
  • Burton, M, Bettinson, V, Richardson, K and Speed A (eds) (2024) Research Handbook on Domestic Violence and Abuse (Edward Elgar).
  • Watkins, D and Burton, M (eds) (2025) Research Methods in Law (Routledge),

Reports

Articles

  • Carline, A, Burton, M and Palmer, E (2025) The significance of vulnerability in the sentencing of rape, Criminal Law Review, 653-674.
  • Burton, M. (2024) Policing Men, Policing Women: Responsibility and Accountability for Violence Against Women and Girls, Including Domestic Abuse and Femicide Journal of Gender, Sexuality of the Law, 3(1) 31-48.
  • Burton, M, Bettinson, V, and Munro, V. E (2024) 'It isn't just a shove': Judicial understandings of domestic abuse and the challenges of recognising and responding to 'coercive control' in the criminal and family courts. Child and Family Law Quarterly, 36(1) 39-57.