Philip Leverhulme Prize presentation for Professor Emily Grabham

One year after winning a £100k Philip Leverhulme Prize in Law, Kent Law School Professor Emily Grabham has received her award at an event in London.

Delayed by the Coronavirus pandemic, the prizes for 2020 recipients were presented by Sir Keith Thomas CH FBA, at the Philip Leverhulme Prize Gala Dinner held in Plaisterer’s Hall on Tuesday 21 September.

Philip Leverhulme Prizes are awarded to researchers whose work has had international impact and whose future research career is exceptionally promising.

Professor Grabham has achieved international recognition for her research over the last 10 years, attracting numerous competitive grants, and gaining multiple national prizes. Her work champions an influential emerging field of scholarship on the relationship between law and time. She argues that paying attention to how people think about, and experience, time is crucial to understanding how equality laws work.

Since completing her work on the Future of Legal Gender, an ambitious project on the legal regulation of sex and gender in England & Wales, Professor Grabham is working on A Day at a Time, a project which explores the everyday experience of time in the Coronavirus pandemic.

It’s one of two ambitious empirical studies that the Leverhulme prize money has enabled Professor Grabham to undertake and which she hopes will reach a wide public audience.

The second, on ‘Legislative Drafting’, builds on her work on the Future of Legal Gender project. For this, Professor Grabham will conduct a multi-sited ethnographic study applying insights from legislative drafting to key debates in legal theory.

Last week, Professor Grabham’s most recent book, Women, Precarious Work and Care: The Failure of Family-friendly Rights, was published by Bristol University Press. Drawing on interviews with women in precarious work, the book exposes the everyday problems faced by workers balancing work and care. It argues for stronger and more extensive rights that address precarious workers’ distinctive experiences.