每日吃瓜

Responding to domestic abuse – the family justice system

Professor Mandy Burton’s research examines the legal responses to domestic abuse, with a particular focus on criminal justice and family justice. Alongside Professor Rosemary Hunter, she was one of three academic members of the ‘Harm Panel’ (Ministry of Justice, 2020), reporting on how allegations of domestic abuse are dealt with in family law cases relating to child arrangements – evidencing the barriers to safe processes and outcomes. The fundamental reforms recommended by the Harm Panel were accepted in full by the government, including a recommendation for an ongoing review mechanism and a new safety focused/trauma informed investigative approach, frontloading the voices of children. She worked with Professor Hunter and a team of researchers in the Office of the Domestic Abuse Commissioner (DAC) on a pilot of a Family Court Reporting and Review Mechanism and a report ‘Everyday Business’ was published by the DAC in October 2025. The report demonstrates the high prevalence of domestic abuse in the family courts and structural barriers underpinning continuing harm. The findings underline important lessons for the national rollout (announced in spring 2026) of the newly named ‘Child Focused Courts’ recommended by the Harm Panel.

Equity, trust and modern society

Nick Piška is currently completing a book on the fate of the jurisdiction of equity in modern law, to be published with Hart Publishing. The project considers equity’s contributions to the legal architecture of capitalism, including the transformations in the use and nature of trusts and equity’s governance structures such as fiduciary obligations, and asks how equity and trusts law produces and sustains economic and social inequalities.

Technology, epistemic and human-centred justice

Dr Hellen Mukiri-Smith’s research examines how national, international, and transnational law-making processes and laws which govern data, AI and digital technologies can be reimagined to prevent extractivism, exploitation and domination of groups. She is currently exploring how laws and policies that govern Fintech, risk-scoring algorithms embedded within Fintech, and digital identity platforms can be reshaped to promote epistemic and human centred justice to better protect the rights of marginalised and disenfranchised groups. Dr Mukiri-Smith has funding from the Socio-Legal Studies Association to convene workshops and webinars to raise awareness of the impact of the said technologies on low-income groups, the youth, women, sex workers and people at risk of statelessness, and to advocate for changes to laws.

Social reproduction and gender-equitable value chains

Professor Donatella Alessandrini’s research explores how global value chain (GVC) regulation interacts with women’s working, living and environmental conditions, impacting on both their productive and reproductive labour. It aims to contribute to debates about the gender equality potential of women’s participation in GVCs increasingly supported by national governments and international institutions. It follows British Academy-funded research which – drawing on third world approaches to international law, critical studies of value and valuation, and feminist political economy – has provided a sustained legal analysis of the contribution international economic law has made to the proliferation of GVCs and to the unequal distribution of economic rewards along these chains.

Sense-making bodies and perceiving minds in disability law

Recent changes in human rights and mental capacity law around cognitive disability increasingly prioritise individual autonomy, treating the conscious deliberative moment as the key juncture that deserves the respect of others. This autonomy-based focus ignores ways that individuals with cognitive impairments express what matters to them through sensory, everyday interactions with others and their environment, in ways that go beyond moments of conscious decision-making. Professor Camillia Kong’s research seeks to reclaim and conceptualise the phenomenology of sense-making agency in everyday interactions amongst individuals with cognitive impairment, arguing for its centrality in honouring the shape of people’s lives in law and ethics.

Reforming surrogacy law

Professor Kirsty Horsey has a long-standing project in which she seeks to see the law on surrogacy reformed, in the best interests of children and families created by surrogacy. Her work is informed by academic and especially empirical research into the lived experience of surrogates, parents through surrogacy and those intending to become parents that way, and of children either born through surrogacy or whose mother acted as a surrogate for another couple or person. She has published several articles detailing both quantitative and qualitative empirical findings in this area, has co-edited a book entitled Future Directions in Surrogacy Law: Law and Policy Reform in the UK and Beyond and is currently Co-I on the Children’s Voices in Surrogacy Law project ().

A day at a time

Professor Emily Grabham is co-founder of the interdisciplinary A Day at a Time project which explores how people experienced, made and re-made time during the early Covid-19 pandemic. Funded by the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust, and collaborating with Mass Observation, research on this project has traced the fissured futures and ruptured rhythms of pandemic time and analysed how people developed ‘tactics of anticipation’ to orient themselves in relation to changing laws and rules. Ongoing research explores the role of fate and memory in people’s everyday legal consciousness during the pandemic.

Recovering legal histories of incarceration

Professor Máiréad Enright has worked for some time on histories of reproductive injustice and institutional abuse in both Ireland and England. In Ireland, the state largely attributes abuses in institutions such as Magdalene laundries to their Catholic overseers, while emphasising that many families were once enthusiastic supporters of religious discipline for their wayward daughters. In England, the postwar history of equivalent institutions seems all but forgotten. Máiréad’s work traces lawyers’, judges’ and law reformers’ roles in legitimating religious confinement, demonstrating that the law – criminal law, child protection law, and even contract and charity law – were central to the operation of abusive religious institutions. Feminist and critical legal history reminds us that historical injustices cannot be repaired without addressing their rootedness in state and public systems.

Emerging drug markets

Professor Kojo Koram is leading the establishment of the Research Centre on Emerging Drug Markets. The Research Centre on Emerging Drug Markets is a three-year, internationally networked research and policy hub based at 每日吃瓜, designed to generate cutting-edge, policy-relevant research on the global transition from punitive drug prohibition to regulated drug markets. The Centre responds to a critical historical moment in global drug policy, as jurisdictions across the Global South and Global North develop new regulatory frameworks for cannabis and other controlled substances, often in the absence of grounded, justice-oriented evidence. The Centre will produce original, interdisciplinary research; facilitate international workshops and knowledge-exchange forums; and develop a publicly accessible archive of oral histories documenting the experiences of cultivators, workers and communities directly affected by market transitions.

Global production and the international corporate tax system

Dr Clair Quentin is working on the structural relation between the profits of multinational corporations (which arise from global production) and the power to tax that profit (which is shared between countries). It is said that multinationals should be taxed ‘where value is created’, and there exists a widespread perception that the countries that are losing out when multinationals avoid tax are the countries into which they make sales, i.e. predominantly the wealthy countries of the Global North. Dr Quentin’s research pursues alternative analyses which show that the value is not created where sales are made but, rather, upstream in global value chains where the labour is performed; often hyperexploited labour in Global South countries.

Beyond commodity exchange: public ownership and the political economy of energy transition

Dr Andy Woodhouse draws on Marxist political economy and the commodity-form theory of law to examine how public ownership of industry can support the transition to a low-carbon society. It focuses on how the design of public institutions impacts on the extent to which state managers can act with autonomy from market pressures. The extent of this autonomy is crucial, in light of the environmental destruction inherent to an economic system centred on the private pursuit of profit. This project looks at a range of historical examples, including the UK’s post-World War II nationalisation of the commanding heights of the economy. Based on this analysis, it seeks to define institutional forms that can reduce reliance on market exchange, and transition towards an ecologically sound mode of production.

Empire’s law

Dr Tom Frost's research explores how the British Empire continues to influence and shape the modern UK constitution and constitutional doctrines, through both judicial decisions, Acts of Parliament and popular writing. It draws on historical literature and archival records of the Empire in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries which are not the primary focus of much academic literature. The research seeks to show how fundamental concepts like parliamentary sovereignty, the rule of law and the Royal Prerogative are structured by the Empire and imperial influences. It is only through confronting this imperial legacy that the UK will develop a democratic constitution fit for the 21st century.

Public consultation and local democracy in re-naming processes

How do, and how should, legal and administrative processes respond to calls to rename sites that memorialise controversial historical figures?  Recent debates about contested heritage have seen widespread discussion about whether to remove, rename or “retain and explain” monuments, buildings and street names that memorialise Britain’s slave trading and colonial past. These debates are contributing to discussions about how history is constructed and interpreted and to ongoing critical re-examination of Britain’s colonial and slave trading legacies. This research project seeks to understand the role that law plays and might play in such debates.  Funded by a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant (SRG2324\240431) and undertaken by Dr Emily Haslam, 每日吃瓜 and , Kent Law School, the project asks how councils across the country are responding to controversies about the commemoration of historical figures in the urban landscape. With a focus on street names, it explores how the varying approaches they have adopted have facilitated different forms of public participation and their effects by considering a series of key sites: London, Liverpool, Glasgow and Edinburgh.  The project further develops a previous study,

Feminist judgments

Professor Rosemary Hunter is one of the founders of the transnational feminist judgment projects, in which feminist scholars and activists rewrite court judgments from the position of an imagined feminist judge sitting alongside the original judges in the case. These judgments highlight the choices available to judges and the contingency of legal decision-making by demonstrating that even at the same time, with the same law and information available to the court, and subject to the same constraints of authority and form, cases could have been reasoned or decided differently. In doing so, they expose the biases and exclusions inherent in judicial decisions while showing how law might become more inclusive of traditionally marginalised or silenced voices. Professor Hunter’s co-edited book, Feminist Judgments: From Theory to Practice (2010), focused on England and Wales, was followed by a series of projects in other countries and jurisdictions. Her ongoing work includes acting as adviser to the Central and Eastern European Feminist Judgments Project, and co-editing a special issue of the Griffith Law Review following from the Vietnamese Feminist Judgments Project.