Professor Ewan McGaughey

Ewan McGaughey is a Professor of Law who specialises in law, economics and history. He joined King's full time in 2014, after completing a PhD at the London School of Economics (LSE), and working on part-time, fixed-term contracts since 2008 at King's, the LSE and UCL. He holds degrees from King’s, the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin and the LSE. He grew up in Luton, Milton Keynes and Sydney and went to Great Linford Primary School, Forest Lodge, and Fort Street High School.

Before becoming a teacher, Prof McGaughey worked delivering newspapers, at a pizza company as a ‘wobbleboarder’, at a chemist, a toy factory, a supermarket checkout, a cinema, a bank, a heritage consultancy, a clothing company warehouse, a homeless charity, Wembley Council, Lambeth Council, the Prison Ombudsman, Parliament, the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal, a consumer and competition regulator, a housing association, a law firm, and as a double-decker bus tour guide. This made Ewan interested in labour rights and our economic constitution.

Prof McGaughey is also a research associate at the University of Cambridge, Centre for Business Research; teaches each year at the Paris School of Economics; and is a volunteer for the Free Representation Unit. He has held visiting positions at the University of California, Berkeley in 2016, Fukuoka University in 2017, and the University of Sydney in 2019.

Research interests

Prof McGaughey's core research interests are economic and social rights, particularly in the governance of enterprises. He specialises in corporate law, labour law, insolvency, pensions and institutional investment, private law, law and economics, and legal history, in the Commonwealth, the European Union and the United States. He is particularly interested in law’s social role, and its consequences for equality, fairness and justice.

All papers are freely downloadable from LawArXiv (for recent papers) and from SSRN.

Teaching

• Principles of enterprise law
• Contracts
• Labour law
• Constitutional and administrative law
• European Union law
• Trusts
• Land law
• Corporate and insolvency law

PURE profile

For more information on Prof McGaughey's research, visit our research portal.