Dr Clare Williams

Clare Williams is a Lecturer in law at Kent Law School. Her research interests are at the interface of law, economy, and society. In particular, her work on Economic Sociology of Law suggests that if we want to respond more innovatively to the financial crashes, social crises, and environmental catastrophes facing us all, we need alternative ways of doing, talking, and thinking about legal and economic phenomena. Her book An Economic Sociology of Law: Beyond Embeddedness (Routledge, 2022) takes a deep dive into the impact of one metaphor on our legal and economic lives: embeddedness.
She studied at LSE, UCL, and SOAS (PhD, 2019) and was awarded an ESRC-SeNSS Postdoctoral Research Fellowship to join Kent Law School in 2020 before becoming a Lecturer in 2023. Her Postdoctoral Fellowship developed her work from its application to the World Bank’s use of law as a technology of governance to bring about economic development. The Postdoctoral Fellowship also included visual elements, exploring how we might visually communicate legal concepts, methods, and frames using digital art, 3D computer modelling and animation to tell stories about legal and economic phenomena.
Additionally, her research explores experiences of the law school as a disabled socio-legal researcher, and she is currently engaged on a project with Dr Flora Renz (KLS) exploring the experiences of disabled employees during the pandemic, asking if we glimpsed disability inclusion best practice through remote working.
Clare convenes the Public Law 2 module at Stage 2, and would be delighted to speak to students considering research in areas that align with her interests.

• Economic Sociology of Law (ESL)
• Legal framing and metaphor
• Legal design and visualisation
• International Economic Law 
• Disability and the law

Undergraduate

• Public Law 2 (LAWS5920)

• Trustee of the Socio-Legal Studies Association (SLSA)
• Member of the Society of Legal Scholars
• Member of the Law and Society Association