Professor Erika Rackley

• Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (FAcSS), 2022
• PhD, University of Kent, 2003
• LLB (Hons), Cardiff University, 1996

Erika joined the University of Birmingham as professor of law in Spring 2025. An internationally recognised scholar, her sole authored and collaborative research has shaped the academic discipline of law, informed worldwide policy/legal debates, and has led to concrete legislative change in England & Wales and Scotland.

She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, a member of the advisory board for the Judicial Appointments Commission, and sits on the ESRC peer review college and advisory boards for the Journal of Law and Society and Current Legal Problems. She has been awarded the Society of Legal Scholars’ Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship, a British Academy mid-career fellowship, a Philip Leverhulme Prize and, in 2024, was one of three finalists in the ‘Legal Academic of the Year’ category at the Inspirational Women in Law Awards.

With Kirsty Horsey, Erika authors a best-selling torts textbook, Tort Law, which is currently in its 10^th edition. She regularly contributes to print, radio and TV media and co-hosts a popular history podcast: Not for Want for Trying.

She has previously held chairs at the Universities of Kent, Birmingham and Durham and has been a visiting scholar at York University and University of British Columbia (Canada), Université Toulouse 1 Capitole, Toulouse (France), and Emory University (US). She has held a number of administrative roles, including Deputy Head of School, Director of Research, Director of PGR, REF lead and Director of Undergraduate Studies.

• Tort
• Legal Communication

Professor Rackley has supervised several doctorates to completion and is happy to discuss proposals falling within her research interests with prospective PhD applicants. She is especially interested in supervising research in the following areas:
• Legal History – particularly on topics relating to women, women’s pressure groups and feminist law reform
• Judges and the Courts – including judicial diversity, judicial decision-making, and feminist judging and judgment-writing

Erika has a wide-ranging research profile, spanning tort law, legal history, law and literature, judicial studies, gender, and criminal law. Her research is characterised by curiosity and collaboration, shaped by diverse methods, and motivated by a commitment to social justice, public legal education and political change.

Over the years, and often responding to political agendas and law reform, her work has addressed a variety of societal issues including the importance of judicial diversity, the cultural harm of pornography, the regulation of image-based sexual abuse, and the jurisprudence of Lady Hale (the first woman President of the UK Supreme Court). She has co-led large law and humanities research projects including the ground-breaking Feminist Judgments Project and Women’s Legal Landmarks Project. Her research has been widely cited including in the New Zealand parliament, UN, EU and national policy documents and judgments of the Indian Supreme Court and Supreme Court of Iowa.

She has authored/co-edited a number of books including Women, Judging and the Judiciary: From Difference to Diversity (2013), which won the Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship, Women’s Legal Landmarks in the Interwar Years: Not for Want of Trying (2024), which was a Times Law Book of the Year in 2024, Justice for Everyone: The Jurisprudence and Legal Lives of Brenda Hale (2022), Women’s Legal Landmarks: Celebrating the History of Women and Law in the UK and Ireland (2018), and Debating Judicial Appointments in an Age of Diversity (2017).

Her current and future work seeks to deploy legal history as a means effecting social and legal change. She is working on individual and collaborative projects exploring the early years of the Industrial Court, histories of judicial diversity, feminist constellations in law and creating the first virtual museum of women’s history.