About the event
Marie Burton and Linda Mulcahy (University of Oxford) will discuss their chapter titled, “Gender, Feminism and Unsung Workers: The Early Years of the Law Centres Movement 1970 – 1980” published in “Women, Their Lives, and the Law: Essays in Honour of Rosemary Auchmuty” (Hart Publishing, 2023).
You can read the chapter here (although it is not essential to read the chapter in order to attend): ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:56d525a5-0771-426d-9de2-d5542ad6128a/files/rcf95jc565
About the speakers
Marie Burton
Dr Marie Burton specialises in access to justice, legal aid, the legal profession and social welfare law. She has over 30 years’ experience of working in and around the civil and criminal justice system. Marie is a former practising solicitor and senior policy analyst whose work has influenced the development of national policy on legal aid, financial exclusion, high cost credit and debt.
Marie’s recent research focuses on the impact of the Legal Aid Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 (LASPO) on social welfare law. Her study comparing telephone and face-to-face advice identified the significant disadvantages that social welfare law clients experience when dealing with telephone-only services (Calling for Justice: Comparing Telephone and Face-to-face Advice in Social Welfare Legal Aid’, PhD Thesis, LSE, 2015). This research was cited in the Ministry of Justice Post-Implementation review of LASPO in 2019 and other policy responses to the legal aid changes. Marie has also published articles in the Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law and the Journal of Social Security Law.
Marie is an experienced law teacher. She has taught law at Middlesex University and the London School of Economics. Marie is interested too in measures aimed at addressing the attainment gap in higher education.
Marie qualified as a solicitor in 1994. She worked primarily in the independent advice sector representing clients with a range of social welfare problems. She has practised in the areas of housing and homelessness, education, human rights, criminal and family law. She also acted for victims of crime and has taken actions against the police. She has conducted cases in the High Court, county court, criminal courts and before tribunals and has extensive frontline experience of contested litigation.
As a senior policy analyst, Marie influenced the development of national policy. The project she led for the Legal Services Commission (LSC) on the funding of housing possession court duty schemes grew into an essential element of the LSC’s strategy to respond to unmet need for social welfare legal aid. In 2010, her report into payday loans ‘Keeping the Plates Spinning: the perceptions of payday loans in Great Britain’ was one of the earliest in-depth studies of the problems faced by vulnerable consumers using this form of credit and highlighted the need for far-reaching change.
Marie has been a Trustee of several voluntary sector organisations, including the Legal Action Group. She is currently a Friend of the Legal Aid Practitioners Group.
Linda Mulcahy
Linda Mulcahy is the Professor of Socio-Legal Studies and the Director of the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies. She has degrees in law, legal theory, sociology and art history and her work has a strong interdisciplinary flavour. Linda has previously held posts at the LSE, Birkbeck, the Law Commission and Bristol University. She has taken on a number of senior management roles including institutional head of Degree programmes, Head of Department and Dean of Arts. She specialises in dispute resolution and the ways in which lay users experience the legal system. She has undertaken a number of empirical studies of disputes between business people in the car distribution industry, divorcing couples, doctors and patients and neighbours on council estates. Her work has been funded by a range of bodies including the Economic and Social Research Council, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Nuffield Foundation, the Department of Health, the NHS Executive, the Leverhulme Trust and the Lotteries Board.
Linda’s publications span a number of different topics including the socio-legal dynamics of disputes, the design of law courts, feminist and relational perspectives on contract law, visual representations of law and legal methodology. Her most recent book, The Democratic Courthouse authored with Emma Rowden, was published in November 2019. Linda served as an editor of the International Journal of Social and Legal Studies for ten years and is currently a member of the Advisory Board of the Journal of Law and Society.
Linda has played an active role in the Socio-Legal Studies Association and continues to have a keen interest in capacity building in the field. She was Chair of the SLSA for three years and has served twice as its Treasurer. Linda has a particular interest in training and supporting research students and early career academics. She was involved in the organisation of the SLSA annual postgraduate conference for over twenty years and now runs an annual methodology masterclass for research students which is funded by the ESRC. While at the LSE Linda served as the Director of the ESRC Doctoral Training Partnership and subsequently took the lead in establishing the LSE PhD Academy, a multi-disciplinary advice and advanced training hub. At Oxford she teaches on the methodology course run by the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies and has also set up a new course on qualitative methodology for lawyers.
Linda regularly acts as a research consultant to government bodies, regulators and NGOs and has worked closely with the Public Law Project, JUSTICE, the Howard League for Penal Reform and the Law Centres Network. She has recently been re-elected as is a member of the Council of Justice and is working with the Law Centres Network on a history of radical lawyering. She is an academic advisor on the board of the British Library Life Stories Project. Linda is also a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.
Linda regularly travels around the world giving papers and has had Visiting Professor positions at the Faculty of Law in the University of Melbourne and in the School of Architecture at the University of Teachnology in Sydney. She is currently a Visiting Professor at the Australian National University.
