Law, Society and Legal Education Group
The Law, Society and Legal Education Group is the Law School’s most recently established Research Group.
Its work cuts across a range of related aspects of:
- Legal education,
- Socio-legal studies and
- Interdisciplinary legal scholarship.
It includes Professor Richard Collier’s internationally renowned work on legal education, and law, gender and families, the value of which has been recently affirmed by the award of a British Academy Fellowship in 2007.
It further includes the more policy-oriented work of Dr Alison Dunn on trustee exemption clauses (funded by the Law Commission), and Jenny Johnstone on youth offending and restorative justice (funded by both the Department of Constitutional Affairs and the Home Office). Dr Johnstone’s work on restorative justice produced contributions to two major government reports:
- Advice Agencies, Advisors and their Clients, DCA ( 2005),
- Restorative Justice: the views of victims and offenders, the Home Office (2007)
The work of Professor John Alder and Professor Ian Ward on law, literature and history, and Richard Mullender on law and philosophy, underpins the Group’s work in interdisciplinary research in the arts and humanities.
The Law School co-hosted the 2004 ASLP conference on Disagreement, Dissent and Disobedience, and in 2005 ran a seminar series entitled Law as a Field of Pain and Death, the papers from which, edited by Richard Mullender, were published in Issues in Legal Scholarship.
More recently, the School ran a seminar series on Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century, contributors to which included both academics such as Tony Bradney and Antony O’Hear as well as policy-makers such as Higher Education Minister Bill Rammell.