Kent Law School is delighted to announce the appointment of three new Professors of Law: Professor Erika Rackley, who took up her post earlier this month; and Professor Diamond Ashiagbor and Professor Rosemary Hunter, both of whom will join the School in October.
Professor Diamond Ashiagbor
Professor Ashiagbor was previously Professor of Law and Director of Research at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. She has also been Professor of Labour Law at SOAS University of London; Reader in Law and Lecturer in Law at University College London; Research Fellow in the Institute of European and Comparative Law, University of Oxford and Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford; Lecturer in Law at the University of Hull. She has been a Visiting Scholar at Columbia Law School, New York; Senior Fellow at Melbourne Law School; Genest Global Lecturer, Osgoode Hall Law School; and Visiting Researcher at the United Nations University Institute on Comparative Regional Integration Studies (UNU-CRIS), Bruges.
Professor Ashiagbor has research interests in labour/employment law; regional integration (the European Union and the African Union); labour law, trade and development; human rights, equality and multiculturalism; economic sociology of law; socio-legal studies; law and the humanities. She is the author of the monograph The European Employment Strategy: Labour Market Regulation and New Governance, which won the Peter Birks/Society of Legal Scholars Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship 2006. Her current projects include a monograph on ‘Social rights and the market: Embedding trade liberalisation in regional labour law’, interrogating the social dimension of regional economic integration: how markets may be embedded within, constituted by, and ameliorated through the ‘social’, in particular by labour law and social policy, with a focus on integration within sub-Saharan Africa. This research is influenced by ongoing collaborations with Professor Amanda Perry-Kessaris, Professor Prabha Kotiswaran, Professor Ruth Dukes and others to develop an ‘economic sociology of law’.
Professor Diamond Ashiagbor is on Research Leave for 2018-19.
Professor Rosemary Hunter
Professor Hunter is re-joining Kent Law School after four years at Queen Mary University of London. She has undergraduate degrees in Law and Arts (History with English Literature) from the University of Melbourne, Australia, and Masters and Doctoral degrees in Law from Stanford University, USA. She taught for a number of years at the University of Melbourne and then at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, before moving to the UK and the University of Kent in 2006.
Her areas of expertise are broadly in feminist legal studies and socio-legal studies, with a particular focus on family law, judging and the judiciary, and access to justice. She is well known as one of the founders of the Feminist Judgments Projects, in which participants rewrite judgments in existing cases from a feminist perspective, imagining how a feminist judge might have decided the case if she had been sitting on the bench at the same time as the original judges. She has been involved as an organiser of or adviser to projects in England and Wales (with Professor Erika Rackley), Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and Northern Ireland (with Dr Julie McCandless), the USA and India, and has also given seminars based on the project methodology to lawyers and judges in Afghanistan and Bosnia-Herzegovina.
As a socio-legal researcher, Professor Hunter is interested in the way law operates in society and impacts on people’s lives. Recent research includes investigating people’s experiences of resolving family disputes (Mapping Paths to Family Justice, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and of representing themselves in court (Litigants in person in private family law cases, Ministry of Justice, 2014) – both undertaken with colleagues at the University of Exeter. She is the academic member of the national Family Justice Council, and with a number of Kent Law School colleagues, she is also one of the editors of the online journal feminists@law.
Professor Erika Rackley
Professor Rackley joins Kent Law School from the University of Birmingham – twenty years after she first started at Kent as a postgraduate research student. Her research focuses law, gender and feminism, with a particular focus on judicial diversity and the nature of judging, feminist legal history and image-based sexual abuse (including ‘revenge porn’). Alongside her sole-authored research, she has co-led large collaborative, cross-disciplinary research projects including the Feminist Judgments Project (with Professor Hunter and Professor Clare McGlynn) and, more recently, the Women’s Legal Landmarks Project (with Professor Rosemary Auchmuty) which involved over 120 academics, lawyers, activists and judges writing about key legal landmarks – cases, statutes and events – for women from 950-2018. The landmarks will be published as a 700-page volume in December 2018.
Professor Rackley regularly comments in the media on issues relating to her research including Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour and Law in Action as well as in The Guardian and New Statesman. Her scholarship has shaped legislation and policy in the UK and has been widely cited by senior members of the national and international judiciary and in government, parliamentary and NGO reports.
Professor Rackley is currently working on a number of sole and collaborative projects including on the UK Supreme Court, the workings and influence of the Judicial Appointments Commission, the methodology of feminist legal history, and on the prevalence, nature and impacts of image-based sexual abuse in the UK, Australia and New Zealand. She is also working on new editions of her popular tort law text and casebooks (co-authored with Kent colleague, Dr Kirsty Horsey).
