Research Highlights
Jeremy Horder
Professor Jeremy Horder joined the School of Law in September 2010 following a five year term as Law Commissioner for Criminal Law and Evidence. His current research focuses on the way in which criminal law reform should be conducted. Jeremy’s work aims “to show that after a brief flirtation with genuinely public consultation at the beginning of the nineteenth century, criminal law reform became the preserve, first, of the judiciary, and then of a slightly broader range of experts”. His book, Homicide and the Politics of Law Reform is under contract with Oxford University Press. The book will criticise a law reform model largely comprised of experts talking to other experts within a fairly tightly defined circle of influence and suggest ways in which interest groups, and the wider public, should be drawn into the reform process. Jeremy believes that the best legal research forces us to look beyond the immediate horizon.
In law, that may mean being drawn from statutes and cases into (say) philosophy, history, and the social sciences, but in a way that does not aspire merely to show what insights law can offer to those disciplines. Instead, what should ideally be shown is how the study of law can help to define what it means to study key aspects of those other disciplines themselves.
Jeremy also conducts research into bribery and corruption. He is currently looking at how different cultural and legal contexts, and the understanding of these contexts by Governments and companies, affects the way in which legal change is effected.
Leif Wenar
The best legal research has a rigor and clarity that connects you directly to a powerful mind. Compare Bach.
This enigmatic statement captures the research philosophy of Professor Leif Wenar. Leif works in three main areas: International issues (such as war, trade, poverty, the accountability of transnational institutions and inequalities across borders); rights (how the central normative concept of modernity should be analyzed, and how its ascriptions can be justified); and justice (especially the work of John Rawls).
His current project focuses on the ‘resource curse’. Countries that depend on exporting resources like oil and metals are more prone to authoritarianism, they tend to suffer more corruption, they are at a higher risk for civil conflict, and they exhibit greater economic dysfunction. Wenar shows how the policies of major importing states like the UK and US drive the resource curse, and he sets out a policy framework that will generate a better system of international trade in natural resources for both exporters and importers.
Penney Lewis
Penney Lewis joined the School of Law in 1995 and is now Professor of Law. One strand of her current research in the field of medical law deals with legal change on assisted dying (euthanasia and assisted suicide). The question whether assisted dying should be legalised is often treated, by judges and commentators alike, as a question which transcends national boundaries and diverse legal systems. By treating the issue as a transcendent, global ethical question, the important context in which individual jurisdictions make decisions about assisted dying and the significance of the legal methods chosen to carry out those decisions is often lost. Work in this field is dominated by partisan exhortation by proponents or opponents of legalisation. Although comparative work exists, it tends to focus on the experience of assisted dying in practice, rather than on the process of legalisation and its effects.
In her book, Assisted Dying and Legal Change, published by Oxford University Press, Penney focused not on the issue of whether assisted dying should be legalised, but rather on the impact of the choice of a particular legal route towards legalisation. She is also involved in briefing legislators and policymakers, for example the House of Lords Select Committee on the Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill Bill in 2005, and the Scottish Parliament Select Committee on the End of Life Assistance (Scotland) Bill in 2010.