Kent Law School Professors Erika Rackley and Rosemary Hunter have been awarded £11,000 by the Society of Legal Scholars (SLS) to celebrate the legal life and jurisprudence of The Right Honourable The Baroness Hale of Richmond, as one of the Society’s flagship Annual Seminars in 2020.
The two-day conference in central London will be will be a focus of celebrations to mark Lady Hale’s retirement from her role as President of the UK’s Supreme Court in January 2020.
Over 50 leading academics, judges and senior members of the bar, from across the world, will reflect on Lady Hale’s multi-faceted career as an academic, law reformer and judge. Sessions will address Lady Hale’s important contributions to academic scholarship, the Law Commission and family law reform, access to justice and debates about judicial diversity. There will also be sessions organised around key themes of substantive law to which Lady Hale has made notable jurisprudential contributions including: family law and children’s rights; human rights and the state; property and welfare; and equality and autonomy.
Professor Rackley said: ‘Lady Hale is one of the UK’s most distinctive and influential judges. She has had a remarkable legal career. She has been at the forefront of legal changes which have affected the lives of millions of men, women and children. The conference – and subsequent edited collection – will identify and interrogate Hale’s jurisprudence and legal life and will offer new insights into a life in law that has spanned over fifty years.’
Papers from the conference will be published as an edited collection by Cambridge University Press.
Professor Rackley has research interests in law, gender and feminism, with a particular focus on judicial diversity and the nature of judging, feminist legal history and image-based sexual abuse. She co-led the Women’s Legal Landmarks Project with Professor Rosemary Auchmuty from the University of Reading and collaborated with Professor Hunter and Professor Clare McGlynn (University of Durham), on the Feminist Judgments Project.
Professor Hunter has research interests in feminist legal scholarship, access to justice and family law. She recently completed a major research project on ‘Mapping Paths to Family Justice’ which investigated the operation and experiences of different forms of out-of-court family dispute resolution. She has recently been appointed to a government panel steering a public call for evidence on how family courts protect victims of domestic abuse in private family law cases.