Professor Joanne Conaghan awarded SLSA Prize for Contributions to the Legal Community

Professor Joanne Conaghan, Professor of Law at the University of Bristol Law School.

6 December 2024

The Law School’s Professor Joanne Conaghan has been awarded the prestigious Socio-Legal Studies Association’s Prize for Contributions to the Legal Community in recognition of her outstanding contributions to scholarship and impact on the legal academy.

Since its inception in 2011, the Socio-Legal Studies Association (SLSA) Prize for Contributions to the Legal Community has been awarded to 14 senior sociolegal scholars. The SLSA Board announced that this year’s winner is Professor Joanne Conaghan.

The award commendation for Joanne read:

Joanne’s distinguished academic record involves sociolegal, feminist and critical scholarship in labour law, tort, jurisprudence and criminal justice.

Never afraid of controversy, she was a pioneer of feminist legal scholarship in the 1990s, playing a leading role in the founding of feminist legal studies. She exposed the gendered nature of tort law in her groundbreaking and challenging publication The Wrongs of Tort (Pluto Press 1999 co-authored with Wade Mansell). More recently her work on the role of a victim’s sexual history in rape trials gets to the heart of the failures of the legal system in this contentious area.

As Research Director and Head of School at Kent, she nourished its powerful socio-legal traditions and as Head of School at Bristol she oversaw a blossoming of its intellectual focus. She has served on three RAE/REF panels, including once as chair, driving forward the work of colleagues by ensuring that excellence in all the riches of legal research (including socio-legal) is recognised. Joanne continues that work in the British Academy.

Moreover her supervision of numerous students has fostered the careers of many socio-legal scholars including some who have become distinguished in their own right.

Joanne is a fearless, generous and effective colleague who fully deserves the recognition of the sociolegal community.

Professor Conaghan said:

“I am thrilled to have received this recognition from the socio-legal community and feel privileged to be part of such a vibrant and versatile research-community. Legal scholarship has never been more multi-disciplinary and multi-methodological and this welcome breadth of vision and diversity of approaches owes much to the role of the SLSA in fostering socio-legal studies. It is an honour to have their regard.”

Professor Conaghan will receive the award at the annual Socio-Legal Studies Association dinner in Liverpool in April 2025.

Further information

Professor Joanne Conaghan is Professor of Law at the University of Bristol Law School. A graduate and postgraduate of St Hugh’s College Oxford, and previous Head of the Law School at the University of Bristol and at the University of Kent, she has been a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences since 2011 and of the British Academy since 2021. She acted as Chair of the REF2021 Law Subpanel and as Deputy Chair in 2014.  Joanne has written extensively about issues relating to gender and law and is widely recognized as a leading scholar in that field, both nationally and internationally. 

Professor Joanne Conaghan awarded SLSA Prize for Contributions to the Legal Community

Further information

Professor Joanne Conaghan awarded SLSA Prize for Contributions to the Legal Community