Kent Law School is delighted to announce the appointment of three new lecturers and a new Solicitor; Lecturer Dr Ed Kirton-Darling and Kent Law Clinic Solicitor Vivien Gambling took up their positions at Kent Law School this term with Gavin Sullivan joining the School in January 2016 and Dr Rose Parfitt commencing her post in April 2016.
Viven Gambling
Vivien Gambling joined Kent Law School in September 2015. She previously worked as a solicitor at a leading solicitors’ firm in London with a focus on human rights, public law and social welfare law, and subsequently as the Senior Solicitor at Lambeth Law Centre in London.
Throughout her career Vivien has been actively involved with charities and ‘voluntary sector’ organisations, alongside working as a solicitor. Vivien was Chair of the Housing Law Practitioners Association (HLPA) for several years and Chair of a Law Centre in London. Currently Vivien is on the Board of Directors of a Law Centre and has joined the management committee of Canterbury Housing Advice Centre (CHAC).
Vivien is particularly interested in housing law (including homelessness) and access to justice. As Chair of the Housing Law Practitioners Association Vivien was involved in lobbying the government and the Legal Aid Agency on proposed changes to the law and against cuts in legal aid for housing cases.
In her previous job at Lambeth Law Centre, Vivien and colleagues ran the duty possession scheme (representing tenants at court defending possession proceedings) and launched a campaign against the proposal to close the county court. Vivien’s current concerns include the immigration bill; also the likely impact of proposed court closures and of “modernisation” of the courts, given the difficulties already experienced by unrepresented litigants in trying to navigate a strained civil justice system.
Dr Ed Kirton-Darling
Dr Kirton-Darling joined Kent Law School in November 2015 as a Lecturer. His research interests lie broadly in Public Law and Family Law, with an emphasis on critical interdisciplinary approaches.
From 2012 to 2015 Dr Kirton-Darling undertook an ESRC (SEDTC) funded PhD in Socio-Legal Studies at Kent Law School and was awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of Law in November 2015. His thesis was entitled ‘Looking for justice: the family and the inquest’ and was an interdisciplinary examination of the family and the contemporary inquest system, drawing on empirical, historical and jurisprudential approaches. Before undertaking this research, Dr Kirton-Darling practised as a solicitor in the Civil Liberties team at Hodge, Jones & Allen (2009-2012), where he also trained to be a solicitor (2007-2009), and he worked as a Research Assistant in the Public Law team at the Law Commission from 2004-2006. Dr Kirton-Darling undertook an LLB Law degree at Leeds in 2000-2003, before completing an LLM in Human Rights at UCL in 2004, and the Legal Practice Course at the University of Westminster in 2007.
Dr Kirton-Darling has a broad range of research interests, including his work in relation to inquests, which focuses on UK and international inquiries and investigations into sudden death and the role of kin in those investigations (Inquests; Coroners; Coroners Officers; Death and Society; Legal History; Social, Legal, Cultural Constructions of the Family and Kin; Human Rights Law; Constitutional and Administrative Law; Legal History). He also has wideranging interests across public law, including social welfare, housing/homelessness and family law, with a particular interest in the role of registration in law. He co-convenes the ‘Registering Registration’ theme at the SLSA Annual Conference (2015 and 2016) with Dr Julie McCandless (LSE).
Dr Kirton-Darling teaches Family Law (LW505) and also contributes lectures on Inquiries to Public Law I (LW588). He taught as part of the Public Law team at Kent Law School from 2012-15, leading seminar groups and giving lectures on Inquiries. He has previously held teaching roles at the London School of Economics (Housing Law) and London Metropolitan University (an Introduction to Law; Civil Liberties and Human Rights).
In addition to being a member of the Law Society (solicitor, non-practising), Dr Kirton-Darling has membership of: the Social Legal Studies Association; the Association for the Study of Death and Society; the UK Constitutional Law Association; the Coroners Officers and Staff Association; the Human Rights Lawyers Association; Quaker Homeless Action (Trustee and Clerk); and the Legal Action Group (former Trustee).
Gavin Sullivan
Gavin Sullivan will be joining Kent Law School as a lecturer in January 2016. Prior to joining the School, he worked as a doctoral researcher in the Political Science department at the University of Amsterdam (the Netherlands). Gavin’s current research focuses on the politics of global security law. He uses socio-legal and ethnographic methods to examine security techniques and problems of transnational governance. Gavin is especially interested in understanding how law changes when trying to counter unknown future threats and how different materials, forms of expertise and knowledge practices help to create and shape what law is.
His recent publications include: ‘The Politics of Security Lists’ (2016) Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (forthcoming, with Marieke de Goede); ‘Transnational Legal Assemblages and Global Security Law: Topologies and Temporalities of the List’ (2014) 5(1) Transnational Legal Theory 81-127; Building Peace in Permanent War: Terrorist Listing & Conflict Transformation (2015, with Louise Boon-Kuo, Ben Hayes and Vicki Sentas); and ‘Between Law and the Exception: The UN1267 Ombudsperson as a Hybrid Model of Legal Expertise’ (2013) 26(4) Leiden Journal of International Law 833 (with Marieke de Goede).
Gavin is a practising solicitor with a background in public law and human rights litigation. He has represented clients in proceedings before the High Court and Court of Appeal, the European Court of Human Rights and the UN Security Council. Gavin previously directed the Counterterrorism Program at the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights in Berlin (Germany) and has worked as a litigator with Leigh Day & Co (London), Treasury Solicitors (London) and Public Interest Lawyers (Birmingham). He has advised peacebuilding organisations working in Somalia on the impact of counterterrorism measures on their work. He currently coordinates the Transnational Listing Project – a global law clinic providing pro bono legal representation to people targeted by security lists worldwide.
Gavin is an Associate Researcher with the Centre for the Politics of Transnational Law at VU University (the Netherlands); an alumni of the Transnational Law Summer Institute (TLSI) at Kings College (London) and an editor of the journal Transnational Legal Theory. He is currently preparing a research monograph on UN sanctions against Al Qaeda for publication.
Dr Rose Parfitt
Dr Parfitt has recently been awarded a prestigious £225,000 award of a Discovery Early Career Research Fellowship (DECRA) by the Australian Research Council. She was previously a McKenzie Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Melbourne Law School’s Institute for International Law and the Humanities. A further £14,000 has been awarded to Dr Parfitt to help build solid links (and research collaboration) between Kent Law School and Melbourne Law School.
In addition to building links with Melbourne, Dr Parfitt will use the DECRA award to run two international workshops (one of which will be held at Kent Law School) that will initiate links with Columbia University, Brown University, The Humboldt University of Berlin and the University of Amsterdam.
Dr Parfitt also plans to write a second book (International Law, Fascist Internationalism and the Logic of the Global Legal Order); an edited collection (Fascism and the International: New Perspectives) together with a number of peer-reviewed articles.
Dr Parfitt’s research interests lie in the relationship between law, history and art. She is particularly interested in the concept of legal personality (or legal subjectivity) and its role in the distribution of wealth, power and pleasure within states and across the global legal order. Her current research project aims to put pressure on the taken-for-granted opposition between fascism and international law. Her book, International Personality on the Periphery: the Abyssinia Crisis and International Law, is currently under review at Oxford University Press.
Dr Parfitt received her doctorate in 2011 from the SOAS Law School (University of London). She is has been a faculty member at the Institute for Global Law and Policy (Harvard Law School) since 2011 and has taught or continues to teach at several other institutions including the American University in Cairo, Helsinki Law School, the London School of Economics, SOAS, Los Andes University and Melbourne Law School.
She is the director of the Constellations seminar series on methodology and interdisciplinarity; the co-director (with Dr Luis Eslava) of a collaborative research network on International Law and Politics at the (US) Law and Society Association; and an active member of the HAAIL (History, Anthropology and the Archive of International Law) and After Self-Determination projects.
Dr Parfitt’s areas of teaching, research and supervision interests include: critical legal studies; international criminal law; international economic law; international law in the Middle East; international relations; international trade law; law and development; legal history; legal theory; postcolonial studies; property law; public international law; public law; social theory; TWAIL (third world approaches to international law).
