Jakub Bokes

Jakub Bokes completed his PhD at LSE Law School in March 2026. His research adopts a critical and socio-legal approach to explore the relationship between environmental law and capitalism, both historically and in the present. Jakub's PhD thesis was a history of environmental law's relationship with social conflict, focusing on nineteenth century Britain. Jakub's academic work has been published by the International Journal of Law in Context, the Review of European, Comparative & International Environmental Law, and Filozofia, and his non-academic writing has appeared in Jacobin magazine.

During his Visiting Fellowship, Jakub is developing a new project which will explore the distribution of liability for industrial pollution in Victorian Britain. The project will seek to understand the extent to which the distribution of liability for industrial pollution was consistent with developments in vicarious employer liability and, insofar as it was not, identify social factors that can explain this inconsistency. Based on archival research, the project will map who was prosecuted under Victorian laws for controlling smoke, chemical, and water pollution and by so doing, test the narrative that the nineteenth century saw the universal spread of the doctrine of strict employer liability which insulated employees from personal responsibility.