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About
Nicola Lacey is School Professor of Law, Gender and Social Policy. From 1998 to 2010 she held a Chair in Criminal Law and Legal Theory at LSE; she returned to LSE in 2013 after spending three years as Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, and Professor of Criminal Law and Legal Theory at the University of Oxford. She is also an Associate of the at LSE, and sits on the Institute’s Steering Committee; an Affiliate of the Phelan US Centre, and sits on the Centre’s Advisory Board; and a member of the Editorial Board of the LSE Public Policy Review. She has held a number of visiting appointments, most recently at Harvard Law School and at the Australian National University. She is an Honorary Fellow of New College Oxford and of University College Oxford; a Fellow of the British Academy; and from 2015-19 she was a member of the Board of Trustees of the British Museum. In 2011 she was awarded the Hans Sigrist Prize by the University of Bern for outstanding scholarship on the function of the rule of law in late modern societies and in 2017 she was awarded a CBE for services to Law, Justice and Gender Politics. In 2022 she was awarded the Law and Society Association’s International Prize.
Administrative support: Law.Reception@lse.ac.uk
Research
Nicola's research is in criminal law and criminal justice, with a particular focus on comparative and historical scholarship. Over the last few years, she has been working on the development of ideas of criminal responsibility in England since the 18th Century, and on the comparative political economy of punishment. In addition to her independent work in these fields, she is currently working with David Soskice (LSE) on American Exceptionalism in crime, punishment, and social policy; and with Hanna Pickard (John Hopkins) on how criminal justice institutions may be designed so as to hold offenders responsible without engaging in stigmatising blame. Nicola also has research interests in legal and social theory, in feminist analysis of law, in law and literature, and in biography. She is convenor of the Socio-Legal Studies Research Hub.
Publications
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Teaching
Engagement and impact
- 12/11/24LSE Law Ratio Podcast: 'Death by Infected Blood: Examining the Infected Blood Inquiry' [Spotify | Apple]
- 22/10/24LSE Law Ratio Podcast 'The Right to Security in the Criminal Law' [Spotify | Apple]
- 01/10/24 LSE Law Ratio Podcast 'Constitutionalism, Rights, and Protecting Courts from Political Capture '[Spotify | Apple]
- 10/05/21 Phelan US Centre Explore the State of the States blog: Building Back Better: Biden has taken some first steps towards a less inhumane and biased criminal justice system LSE Phelan US Centre Blog
- 20/04/20 In Search of Criminal Responsibility (New Books Network, podcast)
- 6/11/17 LSE IQ Episode 8 | Is our prison system broken?
- 26/10/17 Professor Lacey's lecture Women Crime and Character in the Twentieth Centuryis is now available as a podcast. This lecture was given as part of the Maccabaean Lectures in Jurisprudenceseries at the British Academy.
- 21/09/16 The Ballpark podcast Episode 8: America’s contentious and complicated crimial justice system[!--Start--]
- 01/02/14 Philosophy Bites Podcast Nicola Lacey on H.L.A. Hart on Legal Positivism
- 01/02/14 Philosophy Bites Podcast Nicola Lacey on Criminal Responsibility
- 25/10/13 Denying prisoners the vote creates a barrier to their reintegration into society
- See also Gender, Inequality and Power Commission