Hilary Sommerlad
Chair in Law and Social Justice - University of Leeds
School of Law
The Liberty Building
University of Leeds
Leeds, LS2 9JT
UK
Hilary Sommerlad is Professor of Law and Social Justice at the School of Law, University of Leeds, and Co-Director of the Legal Professions Research Group, with research focused on access to justice, the representation of women and minorities in the legal profession, legal aid, and the impact of neo-liberalism and the state on legal professions internationally. She holds a BA in History from Cambridge, a PhD in Political Science from York, and qualified and practiced as a solicitor before returning to academia, holding positions at Leeds Beckett, Leicester, and Birmingham—where she served as Research Director of the Centre for Professional Legal Education and Research—prior to joining Leeds in 2016. A Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and a founder and executive member of the Judicial Diversity Initiative, she is active in numerous international scholarly organizations including JUSTICE, the Society of Legal Scholars, the Socio-Legal Studies Association, and the International Sociological Association’s Research Committee on Sociology of Law, where she chairs a sub-group on Legal Professional Values and Identities. Her output includes nine books and reports, 29 peer-reviewed articles, and 31 book chapters with over 1,600 citations, with work translated into Russian, Spanish, and Japanese, and she co-edited a major two-volume international study, Lawyers in Society, with Rick Abel, Ulrike Schultz, and Ole Hammerslev (Hart 2020, 2022). She has led research projects funded by the Ministry of Justice, the Law Society, the Legal Services Board, the Nuffield Foundation, and the Ford Foundation, has held visiting positions in the CIS, Canada, the United States, and Australia (including Distinguished Visiting Mentor at ANU in 2014), serves on the editorial boards of journals including the Journal of Law and Society and the International Journal of the Legal Profession, and has delivered more than 200 conference presentations and keynotes worldwide.