Cressida Auckland
Cressida’s socio-legal research is in the field of medical law, focussing in particular on mental capacity, mental health and end of life decision-making. Her research lies at the intersection of law, philosophy and psychiatry, with recent research examining how the law ought to resolve the tension between liberal conceptions of freedom and the value-laden discipline of psychiatry; and when the state is justified in interfering with parental decisions about their child’s medical treatment.
Jacco Bomhoff
Jacco is a private international lawyer and comparativist whose socio-legal work includes the cultural study of law, the investigation of legal technique and comparative legal studies.
Nafay Choudhury
Nafay’s socio-legal research sits at the intersection of legal pluralism, private governance, economic development, and legal anthropology, with a focus on fragile settings. His research explores the fragmented and plural forms of order that exist within the state, alongside the state, and beyond the state. He has conducted fieldwork in Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Japan, and Malaysia.
Tatiana Flessas
Tatiana’s work looks at culture, heritage, and art law as reflecting broader social movements and especially uses philosophy and social theory to examine why the past remains so important to modernity. She also is interested in legal questions around the body and technology, in particular the regulation of obesity and art.
Conor Gearty
Conor is a public and human rights lawyer. His socio-legal interests include anti-terrorism law in its socio-legal context.
Hannah Gibbs
Hannah’s work is on medical law and family law. She previously practised as a barrister in the field of public law with a particular emphasis on health law. She is a co-author and editor of the only practitioner text on NHS law and practice. Her socio-legal interests include health inequalities and how the structure and delivery of health services perpetuate them.
Emily Jackson
Emily’s socio-legal interests are in the field of medical law, with a particular interest in reproduction, assisted dying and the regulation of the pharmaceutical and medical devices industries.
Nicola Lacey
Niki works on criminal law and justice. Her socio-legal interests include the comparative political economy of crime and punishment, feminist legal studies and social theory. Her interdisciplinary interests also include biography, law and psychology, and law and literature.
Luke McDonagh
Luke is an intellectual property lawyer whose scholarship includes empirical research. His recent theatre and copyright book is based on an empirical case study involving qualitative interviews with theatre writers, directors, actors and others.
Richard Martin
Richard conducts socio-legal research at the intersection of criminal justice, human rights and public law. A central strand of this concerns the relationship between law, regulation and policing, and exploring how law comes to be socially constituted, organizationally conditioned and routinely interpreted by officers.
Sonya Onwu
As a postcolonial feminist, Sonya’s work explores law’s complicity in the continued oppression of Black people and people of colour. Her most recent work looks at the politics of decolonising the law curriculum, with particular attention given to how we think about and understand the ‘what is law’ question. Sonya’s current project explores the importance of unsettling the neutrality of foundational learning skills as a key first step in creating critical legal thinkers who can engage with decolonised thinking about rights and justice.
Abenaa Owusu-Bempah
Abenaa’s socio-legal includes work on the admissibility and use of rap music as evidence in criminal trials, the participatory role of defendants in criminal proceedings, and the legal process for prosecuting hate crime.
Mona Paulsen
Mona is an international trade lawyer whose work applies historical methodology and draws from political economy to engage with legal questions.
Jill Peay
Jill has done extensive socio-legal work on the operation of mental health law; her principal focus is on human factors in decision making in mental health contexts.
Marie Petersmann
Marie is an international environmental lawyer whose socio-legal interests include the study of socio-ecological harms and inequalities and how they register in/as law. Her work explores new strategies for reparative legal actions and climate justice by focusing on de-anthropocentric, de-colonial, and de-humanist legalities.
Thomas Poole
Tom is a public lawyer whose socio-legal interests include discourse and textual analysis; cultural inquiry; social theory.
Joseph Spooner
Joe researches issues of law, policy, and politics relating to household debt, over-indebtedness, and financialisation, as well as dispute resolution and access to justice, with a focus on how law serves low-income groups. Joe works in the Law-and-Society tradition, while incorporating contemporary elements of Modern Legal Realism and Law and Political Economy. He aims to explore law in its social context,incorporating empirical approaches alongside theoretical perspectives and doctrinal critique, as well as exploring the policy impact of law reform projects.
Andy Summers
Andy’s socio-legal research on research on tax law and policy focuses on the taxation of wealth. He use administrative tax data to study tax planning by the very rich. His current projects include studies on capital gains and measurement of inequality, the UK’s ‘non-dom’ tax regime, and tax and international migration.
Sarah Trotter
Sarah’s work is mostly in the fields of European human rights law and family law. She is particularly interested in the assumptions that are made in law about how we relate to one another and ourselves.
Roxana Willis
Roxana’s research investigates the legal system through the prism of structural inequality, with a focus on class and race. Her work is multidisciplinary, intersecting with legal anthropology, philosophical enquiry, and the history of ideas. In addition to researching in the UK context, Roxana is interested in the interconnections between global working-class struggles.
Ayse Gizem Yasar
Ayse Gizem’s work is at the intersection of law and innovation studies. She is interested in the study of innovation against the backdrop of capitalist institutions and history of economics. Her written work has covered contemporary questions in law and economics, history of economic thought, and entrepreneurship.
Jan Zglinski
Jan Zglinski conducts empirical research on EU constitutional and internal market law, with a particular focus on economic integration and free movement. He also examines broader themes relating to the place and potential of empirical legal studies in EU law. His EU Free Movement of Goods Dataset can be found here.
Centennial Professor
Susanne Baer
Susanne was a Justice of the German Federal Constitutional Court for 12 years and is the Professor of Public Law and Gender Studies at Humboldt University of Berlin as well as Global Faculty at University of Michigan/USA. She is one of the world’s leading authorities on comparative constitutional law (a coauthor of a lead casebook: Comparative Constitutionalism, now in the 4th edtion), and in legal gender studies and law against discrimination. She is also the author of the treatise on Rechtssoziologie, now in its 5th edition, covering theories from Weber to Marx, Luhmann to MacKinnon, as well as fields of legal practice, from the actors of and in the law and mobilization of laws to regulation, adjudication and effects.
Visiting Professor
Insa Koch
Insa is an anthropologist and a lawyer who works on questions of the state, intersecting inequalities and political economy. Her monograph Personalizing the State offers an ethnographic study of state-citizen relations at Britain's margins. She's currently completing her second monograph on the state's discovery of 'modern slavery', drug trafficking and empire's afterlives in austerity Britain. Insa holds the Chair of British Cultures at the University of Sankt Gallen, Switzerland.