Legal Education and the Profession - University of Birmingham

We consider the nature of legal education and the legal profession.

As a group we consider the nature of legal education and the legal profession, spanning: the way in which legal professionals are and should be educated; legal ethics; regulation of the legal profession(s); access to justice; alternative dispute resolution, the court system and the legal profession; innovations in legal practice including lawtech; the sociology of the legal profession; professional identity and much more. We employ a range of research methods including empirical, critical and jurisprudential methods and operate cross jurisdictionally.

Staff researching in this theme

Emily Carroll's research is to do with law and property; she is interested in exploring how land interacts with a wide spectrum of private and public law principles, including land law, equity, company and insolvency law, and planning law and policy.
Rachel Charman - Chinese; Language and Law; Equivalence in translation; effect of English judgments on Chinese judicial reform; course design including SQE.
Natasha Gooden's research addresses public international law and advancements in technology, with a focus on cyber operations, conflict and human rights.
Rosie Harding uses empirical and conceptual socio-legal methods to investigate the place of law in everyday life, with a focus on social justice, family law and disability law.
Rehana Parveen is interested in English Family Law, Islamic Family Law, Muslim women, religious tribunals, decolonising the law and decolonising the curriculum.
Frances Seabridge has a particular research interest in the curriculum design and the development of legal education, and the fusion of embedding employability skills
Linden Thomas' research focusses on clinical legal education, pro bono, public legal education and employability.
Lisa Webley's research considers the regulation, education and ethicality and professionalism of the legal profession, and broader access to justice and rule of law concerns.
Chen Zhu's research focuses on intellectual property law (especially music copyright), computational legal research methods and legal pedagogy.

Members of the research theme are involved in the Research Committee on the Sociology of Law International Working Group for the Comparative Study of the Legal Professions, SLS, SLSA, ALT and Law Society Association and related scholarly associations. We work closely with Birmingham Law School's Centre for Employability, Professional Legal Education and Research (CEPLER) with some of our research being published in the CEPLER Working Paper series as well as in journal articles and edited collections.