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The University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NZ, T +44 (0)1227 764000
Socio-legal Studies LLM, MPhil, PhD
This is a research programme within the Law subject area.
Key facts
- Subject area: Law
- Location: Canterbury
- School: Kent Law School
- Duration: LLM one year full-time or two years part-time, MPhil two years full-time or three years part-time, PhD registration three to four years full-time or five to six years part-time.
- Start: At any time but preferably in September.
- Fees: More info
- Entry requirements: A first or good second class honours degree in law or a relevant subject. A Master's degree is recommended, but not essential. Please also check our general entry requirements (including English language requirements).
Outline
We welcome applications for research degrees in a wide range of areas. We recommend you contact the School informally before applying, and you should accompany your application with a brief (two- to four-page) outline of the research project you envisage and your intended methodology. You may find it helpful to discuss your project informally with an appropriate member of staff (contact details are on our website) or with the Director of Postgraduate Research.
Programme structure
For further information see the School site.
Funding
Every school at Kent offers one or two University postgraduate research scholarships, each available for three years, providing fees at the home/EU rate and a stipend up to £13,590 per annum (2011/12 rate).
KLS offers scholarships in the form of Graduate Teaching Assistantships (GTAs) whereby postgraduate research students receive financial support in return for teaching. The value of awards may vary, but often cover tuition fees at the home/EU rate and a substantial maintenance grant.
All postgraduate research students are eligible to apply for GTAs. See Graduate Teaching Assistantships.
For the taught LLM programmes, the Law School offers a small number of overseas scholarships.
These offer a full tuition fee scholarship at the overseas rate.
The Law School also offers the Larry Grant Scholarship, with tuition fees paid at the UK/EU rate and up to £1,500, for successful scholarship applicants who carry out research in areas of clinical legal education, human rights or immigration.
Taught and doctoral scholarships are also available to students studying at the University of Kent at Brussels. see: University of Kent at Brussels
View further information about scholarships available in the Kent Law School.
Further information:
Resources and facilities
All postgraduate students at Kent Law School have access to a postgraduate computing room, study area and common room with wireless internet access. The Law School has an active and inclusive extra-curricular academic and social scene, with weekly graduate seminars, a postgraduate student group for all students, and a regular guest lecture programme organised by our research centres (which include the Centre for Critical International Law, the Kent Centre for Law, Gender and Sexuality, and the Kent Centre for European and Comparative Law).
Further information:
Research areas
Kent Law School is a thriving centre of theoretically informed, critical and socio-legal research. The 2008 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) rated Kent Law School as the 6th best Law School in the UK (and 4th for the proportion of research classified as world-class and internationally excellent). The School has traditionally approached the teaching of law both critically and contextually, encouraging students to develop their evaluative skills and to locate law within its broader social, historical and political context. This approach is also reflected in much of the School's research activities and output. In particular, it enjoys an international reputation for innovative, critical and interdisciplinary approaches to law, with special expertise in law, gender and sexuality
Critical Commercial Law and Business Law and Regulation
Kent Law School has established a rich tradition of critical scholarship on the legal regulation of the business practices and commercial relations of market economies that attracts postgraduate students and researchers from around the world. Staff and postgraduate student research features theoretical, empirical, comparative and doctrinal studies and spans a wide range of critical socio-legal approaches to commercial, business and financial institutions The ongoing scholarship of Kent's experts informs their research-led teaching in such fields as consumer debt and bankruptcy, secured credit, intellectual property, international financial institutions, economic development, international trade, international business transactions, commercial arbitration, international labour regulation, corporate governance, banking law, regulation of personal financial services, e-commerce and information technology law.
Staff
Dr Donatella Alessandrini, Dr Kate Bedford, Professor Joanne Conaghan, Professor Paddy Ireland, Dr Alex Magaisa, Dr Gbenga Oduntan, Professor Iain Ramsay, Dr Bernard Ryan, Professor Harm Schepel, Alan Story, Professor Toni Williams, Dr Simone Wong.
Critical International Law
International law at KLS has been characterised by its critical content. Research generally develops the theme that international law is not apolitical and that its political ideology reflects the interests of those in power in powerful states. The analysis of the relationship between power and law is implicit if not explicit in most work on international law within KLS. Research and teaching is conducted at both the Canterbury and the Brussels centre. The Centre for Critical International Law, based at the University of Kent (Canterbury campus) draws upon the strengths of the teaching and research at Kent and promotes the study of International Law.
Staff
Dr Yutaka Arai, Dr Emilie Cloatre, Professor Nick Grief, Dr Emily Haslam, Sian Lewis-Anthony, Professor Wade Mansell, Francesco Messineo, Dr Gbenga Oduntan, Dr Bernard Ryan, Professor Toni Williams.
Criminal Justice
Much of the School's research activity in criminal justice takes place in co-operation with the Department of Criminology and under the auspices of the Kent Criminal Justice Centre. Established in 1996, the Centre co-ordinates and encourages research in the field of criminal justice, and develops teaching and education initiatives, especially in co-operation with local criminal justice agencies.
Staff
Dr Deborah Cheney, Lisa Dickson, Professor Steve Uglow.
Environmental Law
The Law School has been established as a recognised centre of excellence in research and graduate teaching in environmental law, spanning international, EC and national law and policy. Current research interests include climate change, water law, biodiversity conservation, regulation and enforcement, and trade.
Staff
Dr Donatella Alessandrini, Dr Emilie Cloatre, Martin Hedemann-Robinson, Professor William Howarth, Professor Wade Mansell, Donald McGillivray, John Wightman.
European and Comparative Law
European and Comparative Law is being conducted both at an individual level and at the Kent Centre for European and Comparative Law, which was established in 2004 with a view to providing a framework for the further development of the Law School's research and teaching activities in this area. Research and teaching reaches from general areas of comparative and European public and private law to more specialised areas and specific projects.
Staff
Dr Anneli Albi, Dr Yutaka Arai, Maria Drakopoulou, Dr Simone Glanert, Professor Nick Grief, Martin Hedemann-Robinson, Professor William Howarth, Donald McGillivray, Francesco Messineo, Dr Bernard Ryan, Professor Geoffrey Samuel, Professor Harm Schepel, Dr Sophie Vigneron.
Gender and Sexuality
Home to the Kent Centre for Law, Gender and Sexuality, Kent Law School makes a significant contribution to the development of feminist perspectives on law, both nationally and internationally. The group produces wide-ranging, interdisciplinary work, drawing on a broad range of intellectual trajectories in addition to legal studies, including political theory, philosophy, sociology, political economy, cultural studies, geography, history and drama. An important aspect of its work is to explore how sexuality is produced through political categories of difference and how it is governed. The research carried out by the group demonstrates a shared preoccupation with inequality and social change. All staff are members of the editorial board of the internationally renowned journal, Feminist Legal Studies.
Staff
Dr Kate Bedford, Dr Brenna Bhandar, Anne Bottomley, Dr Ruth Cain, Dr Helen Carr, Professor Joanne Conaghan, Professor Davina Cooper, Maria Drakopoulou, Emily Grabham, Professor Didi Herman, Dr Kirsty Horsey, Professor Rosemary Hunter, Dr Robin Mackenzie, Professor Sally Sheldon, Professor Toni Williams, Dr Simone Wong, Dr Donatella Alessandrini, Dr Emily Haslam, Mairead Enright.
Health Care Law and Ethics
A number of KLS staff have interests in the area of health care law and ethics, focusing in particular on issues relating to human reproduction. Much of the research carried out by scholars in this cluster is critical and theoretical and has a strong interdisciplinary flavour. In addition to conducting their own research projects, staff have developed strong and fruitful collaborations with ethicists and medical professionals. KLS is home to a well-established LLM programme in Medical Law and Ethics.
Staff
Dr Ruth Cain, Dr Emilie Cloatre, Dr Eleanor Curran, Dr Karen Devine, Dr Kirsty Horsey, Dr Robin Mackenzie, Professor Sally Sheldon.
Law, Politics and Culture
This broad, interdisciplinary field reflects KLS's interest in how power intersects, and is expressed and constituted through, institutional structures, and cultural representations and forms of knowledge production. Scholarship and research this field centres on social cleavages and the systemic generation of inequality, involving class, religion, sexuality, gender, ethnicity, and geography. It also interrogates the systemic character of inequality and power, drawing on recent poststructural theory. Work in this field at KLS is both domestic and transnational, centring on a range of scales from small micro-communities to nationstates and international agencies.
Staff
Dr Donatella Alessandrini, Dr Kate Bedford, Anne Bottomley, Dr Helen Carr, Dr Emilie Cloatre, Professor Joanne Conaghan, Professor Davina Cooper, Dr Emily Grabham, Professor Didi Herman, Professor Rosemary Hunter, Professor Paddy Ireland, Dr Stewart Motha, Mairead Enright.
Law and Political Economy
Law and its relation to political economy are addressed from a variety of angles, exploring the micro- and macro-level of economical regulations as well as its theoretical aspects.
Staff
Dr Donatella Alessandrini, Dr Kate Bedford, Professor Joanne Conaghan, Professor Paddy Ireland, Dr Alex Magaisa, Professor Iain Ramsay, Dr Bernard Ryan, Professor Harm Schepel, Professor Toni Williams.
Legal Theories and Philosophy
While feminist and critical legal theories are focal points at Kent Law School, the departmental expertise equally covers more essential aspects such as classical jurisprudence and the application of philosophy to law. A number of members of staff also have strong interests in health care ethics.
Staff
Dr Brenna Bhandar, Anne Bottomley, Professor Joanne Conaghan, Professor Davina Cooper, Dr Eleanor Curran, Maria Drakopoulou, Máiréad Enright, Dr Simone Glanert, Emily Grabham,Professor Paddy Ireland, Dr Stewart Motha, Dr Stephen Pethick.
Property Law
Kent Law School's property lawyers have a range of overlapping interests in both global and local property issues. Their work covers indigenous people's rights, the environment, housing, community land, social enterprise and urban design, as well as the question of intellectual property. They have links with anthropologists working at the University and have run a very successful series of workshops exploring common interests. Their research draws on a multiplicity of theoretical perspectives including postcolonialism, feminism and Foucault.
Staff
Dr Brenna Bhandar, Anne Bottomley, Dr Helen Carr, Donald McGillivray, Nick Jackson, Dr Alex Magaisa, Dr Stewart Motha, Alan Story, Dr Simone Wong.
Show all
|Staff research
Dr Anneli Albi: Senior Lecturer
Comparative constitutional law; EU constitutional law; EU enlargements; European Neighbourhood Policy.
Dr Donatella Alessandrini: Lecturer
International trade theory and practice; neoliberalism; international political economy; development studies.
Dr Yutaka Arai: Reader
International humanitarian law (including part of international criminal law); the relationship between international humanitarian law and international human rights law.
Dr Kate Bedford: Senior Lecturer
Gender, sexuality and international political economy; critical development studies; the World Bank; Latin America, heteronormativity and social policy; gambling regulation and economic regeneration, especially bingo; UK equalities law and policy.
Dr Brenna Bhandar: Lecturer
Property (‘real' and ‘intellectual' forms); feminist and critical legal theories; post-colonial jurisprudence.
Anne Bottomley: Reader
Property practices in relation to urban planning and architecture – drawing from Deleuze and theoretical perspectives emerging in anthropology and social theory. Debates surrounding theoretical perspectives within feminism.
Dr Ruth Cain: Lecturer
Regulation and representation of reproduction and parenting, especially maternity, tracking relationships between law, literature, popular culture and the media, and how these shape perceptions of gender, sexuality and embodiment, health care law, including mental health; the gendering of capitalism, neo-imperialism and post 9/11 trauma.
Dr Helen Carr: Reader
Housing law and social welfare, with particular interests in regulation of the poor and gendered and the racialised dimensions of that regulation.
Dr Emilie Cloatre: Lecturer
The intersection between law and contemporary ‘science and society' issues, for example patent law and access to health care, and the regulatory networks of climate change. This is particularly (although not exclusively) in the context of developing countries.
Lorna Collopy: Senior Lecturer; Clinic Solicitor
Consumer law, particularly unfair terms in standard form contracts.
Professor Joanne Conaghan: Professor; Head of School
Labour law (especially work and family issues); equality law and theory; feminist legal studies; critical legal theory; tort law; legal regulation of violence against women.
Professor Davina Cooper: Professor
Social and political theory; cultural geography; feminism and sexuality; governance and radical politics; Utopian studies.
Dr Eleanor Curran: Lecturer
Hobbes; rights theory and the history of rights theory; political theory; moral theory; jurisprudence.
Dr Karen Devine: Lecturer
The law of obligations; tortious legal issues, particularly those relating to the collection, storage and use of human tissue; decision-making in health care and the role of informed consent; medical law and ethics generally.
Lisa Dickson: Lecturer
Forensic science and the law; evidence and the trial process; general areas of criminal justice.
Maria Drakopoulou: Reader
Feminist theory; feminist jurisprudence; legal theory and philosophy; legal history; Roman law; equity and trusts.
Mairead Enright: Lecturer
Legal regulation of culture and religion, and particularly the effects of legal engagement with traditionally ‘private' aspects of religious practice for ‘public' conceptions of membership.
Professor John Fitzpatrick: Professor; Director of Law Clinic
Human rights law; constitutional law; public legal services; legal process.
Dr Simone Glanert: Lecturer
Comparative legal studies; legal translation; statutory interpretation; European law; French law and German law.
Emily Grabham: Senior Lecturer
Citizenship; belonging and corporeality; feminist and queer theories of embodiment; labour law; welfare reform and its connection to work/family policy.
Professor Nick Grief: Professor
Public international law, human rights and EU law, with particular reference to the legal status of nuclear weapons.
Dr Emily Haslam: Lecturer
Public international law; international criminal law; civil society.
Martin Hedemann-Robinson: Senior Lecturer
European Union and international environmental, law, notably in relation to law enforcement.
Professor Didi Herman: Professor
Gender and sexuality; race, religion and ethnicity; popular culture; social movement; law reform.
Dr Kirsty Horsey: Lecturer
Human reproduction and genetics, particularly where these overlap with issues in family law; legal education.
Professor William Howarth: Professor
Environmental and ecological law, with particular emphasis on the legal protection of the aquatic environment and the ecosystems that it supports.
Professor Rosemary Hunter: Professor
Feminist legal scholarship including family law, access to justice, domestic violence, women's employment (including women in the legal profession and women judges), anti-discrimination law, and dispute resolution; the interface between law and society, and people's encounters with the legal system. Recent work has taken an empirical approach, or has sought to build feminist legal theory from empirical data.
Professor Paddy Ireland: Professor
Historical development of company law; corporate governance and theory; law and neo-liberalism; critical legal theory.
Nick Jackson: Senior Lecturer
Land law; housing; intellectual property and scholarship of learning and teaching.
Per Laleng: Lecturer
Law of tort- focused on the concept of causation particularly in the context of industrial and other diseases. Other research includes law and football, and law and photography.
Sian Lewis-Anthony: Lecturer
International human rights law, in particular, the right to a fair trial and the issue of the independence and impartiality of the judiciary.
Dr Robin Mackenzie: Reader
Bioscience and law; body modification; constructions of addiction; death and the dying process; enhancement; feminist perspectives; genetics and other new technologies; neuroscience; neuroethics and law; propertisation and biovalue; psychoactive substances; public health governance; reprogenetics; strategic rhetoric in regulation; surrogacy; critical and cultural theory applied to all the above.
Dr Alex Magaisa: Senior Lecturer
Financial services regulation, with special focus on international finance centres (offshore finance jurisdictions); the law relating to corporate groups, with special interest in responsibility for corporate torts; intellectual property and developing countries; general interest in the interaction between law and politics in Africa.
Donald McGillivray: Senior Lecturer
Environmental law, in particular aspects of environmental law related to land (common land, conservation law, impact assessment, land torts); climate change law; EC environmental law; water law.
Professor Wade Mansell: Professor
Public international law and (to a lesser extent) the law of tort. Within international law, the relationship between law and power. Perspective might fairly be categorised as ‘critical', meaning to argue usually that international law is likely to reflect power and the interests of the powerful, albeit significantly disguised. Concern is about attempts to use international law to redress the gross imbalance that underlies concepts of ‘sovereign equality'. Particularly interested in international debt, and the State of Israel in international law. Within tort, interest is in ‘negligence' and the absurdity of the concept in its use as an accident compensation mechanism.
Francesco Messineo: Lecturer
International constitutional law and the rights of individuals, particularly in regard to the rules governing international human rights law, the law of armed conflict and international refugee law; and the consequences arising from the violation of these rules.
Dr Stewart Motha: Reader
The relationship between sovereign power and law. More recently, sovereignty in the ‘war on terror', constitutionalism and decolonisation in South Africa, and the intersection of imperialism and governance in the British Indian Ocean Territories (the Chagos Islands). Research interests extend to secularism and political theology, postcolonial theory, indigenous land rights and selfdetermination, regulation of culture and community, law and war, social movements, and theories of democracy.
Dr Gbenga Oduntan: Lecturer
Private and public international law; international courts and tribunals; arbitration; international commercial law; land and maritime boundary and territorial disputes; air and space law; international economic law; immigration and asylum law; constitutional law; criminal justice; scientific and technological issues in policing.
Sebastian Payne: Lecturer
The Crown; constitutional reform; the royal prerogative; oversight issues relating to the intelligence and security services; decision making and its relation to law.
Dr Stephen Pethick: Lecturer
Jurisprudence, with emphasis on epistemology and metaphysics and the law; philosophy of language and the law; reasoning and the law; the concept of coherence and its use in legal theory and legal reasoning; the legal theory of Francis Bacon and in the history of legal ideas from the early modern period onwards; analytic legal theory; legal history; the law of evidence.
David Radlett: Lecturer
The shift in power from the elected and notionally representative and accountable to the unelected and obviously unrepresentative and unaccountable
Professor Iain Ramsay: Professor
Regulation of consumer markets at the national, regional and international level, with a particular interest in issues of credit and insolvency, commercial credit and commercial law, focusing on the role of credit law in development.
Professor Gerry R Rubin: Professor
Military law and its history; aspects of the law of war; modern legal history; constitutional law; criminal law and evidence; relationship between law and modern social, economic, political and military history.
Dr Bernard Ryan: Chair
Immigration law, incorporating aspects of UK law, EU law and international law.
Professor Geoffrey Samuel: Professor
Law of Obligations (English, Roman and French); comparative law; legal remedies; legal theory; legal epistemology.
Professor Harm Schepel: Professor
Legal sociology; international and European economic law.
Professor Sally Sheldon: Professor
Medical ethics and law, particularly with reference to reproductive issues; legal regulation of gender and sexuality; fatherhood.
Alan Story: Reader in Intellectual Property
Intellectual property (domestic and global), especially critical approaches to patent and copyright law; critical intellectual property theory; the politics and economics of intellectual property; copyright issues in the global south.
Helen Strotton: Lecturer
Housing law; employment law.
Professor Steve Uglow: Professor of Criminal Justice
Criminal justice generally, in particular policing and evidence law.
Dr Sophie Vigneron: Lecturer
French public and private law; English tort law; art law.
John Wightman: Senior Lecturer
Theory, history, and empirical work relating to private law, especially tort and contract.
Professor Toni Williams: Professor
Regulation and governance of economic development and market relations; regulation of consumer financial services; the implications of information technology for the regulation of consumer markets.
Dr Simone Wong: Senior Lecturer
Equity; banking and finance; cohabitation and other domestic relationships.
Further information:
Contact details
Admissions enquiriesT: +44 (0)1227 827272
E: information@kent.ac.uk
Postgraduate Office, Kent Law School, Eliot College,
University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent CT2 7NS, UK
T: +44 (0)1227 824595
F: +44 (0)1227 827442
E: klspgoffice@kent.ac.uk
Further information: