Email: s.classmann@lse.ac.uk
Stephanie is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of York, where she leads on a scoping review of law, policy and empirical research for the ESRC-funded project ‘Defendants as Victims: Vulnerability, Victimhood and Safeguards from Charge to Conviction’. The project explores how vulnerability and victimisation can affect suspects and defendants in their ability to mount an adequate defence, and how the current configuration of the criminal process may exacerbate existing vulnerabilities or result in re-victimisation. Institutional stakeholders, such as the Crown Prosecution Service, HM Courts and Tribunals Service, and HM Prison and Probation Service, are consulted as the project unfolds, and the final report – submitted to the Law Commission of England and Wales – will set out whether, why and, if so, how the law of criminal procedure should be reformed.
Stephanie completed her PhD at the LSE in 2023. Drawing and expanding upon the 'realist revival' in contemporary political thought, she wrote about the inadequacy of liberal universalism in capturing what is at stake in criminal justice — and in representative government, more generally — arguing instead for a genuine return to politics as the ongoing, institutionally mediated negotiation of difference and disagreement. She has taught extensively at undergraduate and postgraduate level, both here at the LSE and at the Universities of Kent, Sydney, Düsseldorf and Paris (Cergy). She has spoken at numerous international conferences across the UK, US, Canada, Australia and Western Europe, co-founded and steered the inaugural Philosophy, Law and Politics Graduate Forum in the south of England, and spent a year as visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main.