Dr Charlotte Bendall

• Fellow of the Higher Education Academy
• PhD Law, University of Birmingham
• MSc Socio-legal Studies, University of Bristol
• BA Jurisprudence, University of Oxford (Corpus Christi College)

Charlotte specialises in a range of issues around the family, and leads on the Family Law Reform Now project.  Prior to commencing her academic career, she was admitted to the roll of solicitors of England and Wales, and she also worked in legal publishing, having been employed as the Assistant Editor of Archbold: Criminal Pleading, Evidence and Practice and Criminal Law Week.

• Family Law
• Equity and Trusts

Charlotte is happy to supervise doctoral students for projects focusing on family law, especially those concerning adult relationships.

Find out more - our PhD Law  page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

Charlotte is presently conducting research into grandparents' experiences of seeking contact with grandchildren. This work, entailing interviews with solicitors, mediators and grandparents themselves, seeks to identify obstacles that are being experienced by grandparents in this context, and to consider how the support being offered to them may be optimised. See what she has written about this project here.

Charlotte also jointly established the Family Law Reform Now network, bringing together academics, practitioners and policymakers to pinpoint, and ultimately address, key areas of family law reform. As part of this work, an edited collection is due for publication later in 2024 with Hart.

She has previously conducted research, funded through the Socio-legal Studies Association’s Research Grant scheme, comparing the legal approach to financial remedies against the financial practices of modern day couples ‘on the ground’. Further, she has written on shared parental leave and, for her doctoral thesis, she explored how civil partnerships might help to challenge social and legal constructions about the gendered nature of roles in relationships. More specifically, she looked at how legal professionals negotiated gender in their interactions with their lesbian and gay clients in the context of financial remedies on relationship breakdown, and whether they were still attempting to apply traditional norms of masculinity and femininity (i.e., breadwinning versus homemaking).