Social Justice

The Law School has a significant and growing cluster of researchers and PhD students whose focus is on Social Justice broadly described.

Our cluster includes colleagues with specialisms in human rights, refugee law, housing, medical & mental health law, policing & protest, equality & discrimination law, and environmental law. Members of the cluster conceive themselves as on the side of those who are suffering inequality, who are on the margins or are oppressed, and support the amplification of those who are underrepresented. Its members foreground the law as something with instrumental capacity… sometimes working ‘against the law’ to confound its hegemonic constitutivity, and sometimes working ‘with the law’, using the tools of law and lawyers to combat and challenge state and corporate power, unlocking its (re-) distributive potential, and effecting social, economic, political, or cultural change.

The research interests of the group are varied but can be organised around five substantive themes:

• Regulating (economic) power: business and human rights, corporate social responsibility, regulatory responses to injustice, law & economics, and the public/private divide

• Precarity and the protection of vulnerable or marginalised groups… health/mental capacity; tenants/social housing, prisoners, carers, displaced persons, refugees and asylum

• Protest, public order, and policing

• The challenges of the climate emergency and environmental law

• The pervasion of tech and Big Data – the right to information, access to justice, algorithmic decision-making, and cyber security

We have researchers who employ or rely on various methodologies, from empirical socio-legal, and anthropological ethnographies, to the economics of risk & incentives as well as course as doctrinal legal. We are developing cross-campus links such as social work colleagues whose work looks at vulnerable people in care; political scientists who study energy democracy and just transitions; health scientists looking at palliative care in prisons, health & poverty, and food/housing insecurity; colleagues in film and TV looking at media constructions of subcultural activism; and scholars in international development, looking at corporate social responsibility in sub-Saharan mineral extraction industries.

Colleagues within the cluster are editors of leading books and monographs in the field, and sit on editorial committees of journals and of subject associations. They have been awarded funding to carry out their research and acted as principal or co-investigators on projects. They have given evidence before and worked with parliamentary committees, and with UN Special Rapporteurs, and been cited in reports. They have written reports/papers for IGOs, governments, and think tanks and worked closely with civil society organisations. Their work has been relied on by counsel in argument and by courts in judgment, and finally, they contribute regularly to media debates on radio, or TV or newspapers.

For those interested in pursuing doctoral research in any area of social justice, please contact Professor David Mead – the cluster lead – who will assist in identifying an appropriate supervisor.