Kent Law School’s Professor Erika Rackley was recently a finalist in the Legal Academic of the Year category at the Inspirational Women in Law Awards 2024.
The awards celebrated the current women trailblazers in the legal field, who will be crucial in driving the change needed to ensure that gender equality becomes a reality.
The awards previously formed part of the 2014-2019 ‘First 100 Years’ campaign, a project with the aim of showcasing and raising the profile of Women in Law. 2019 marked 100 years of women being able to practise law in the UK. They are now part of the ‘Next 100 Years’ campaign, a project dedicated to achieving equality for women in law.
The Next 100 Years committee noted that they received a huge number of incredible entries, and felt that Erika, in particular, plays a crucial role in the legal sphere. They commented that ‘as a finalist, we believe that you are one of the faces of the future for women in law.’
Professor Rackley’s current research concentrates on three broad areas: judging and the judiciary (including feminist judgments), feminist legal history and image-based sexual abuse. She is currently working on individual and collaborative projects on the jurisprudence of Lady Hale, the workings and influence of the Judicial Appointments Commission, on proposals to reform the law relating to image-based sexual abuse, and an edited collection of ‘interwar’ legal landmarks for women.
You can hear Erika, along with Sharon Thompson, Professor of Law at Cardiff University as they talk to leading experts about key legal landmarks for women and why they still matter today in a new podcast series called ‘Not for Want of Trying’, which asks what happened after some women got the vote in 1918. New episodes every Friday. Subscribe, follow and download now from Apple and Amazon Music.