About
Jakub returned to LSE Law School as a Fellow in Law in September 2026 after completing his PhD at the Law School under the supervision of Professor Veerle Heyvaert and Professor Mike Wilkinson. He holds a BCL from the University of Oxford and an LLB from LSE and is a Fellow of Advance HE.
Jakub’s research asks how the contradictions of capitalism are reflected in the design and enforcement of environmental law, and how ordinary people organise to resist environmental laws they perceive as unjust. His PhD thesis was a historical-materialist study of the relationship between environmental law and social conflict in Victorian Britain. Some of the findings of this research have been published in the International Journal of Law in Context.
Building on his doctoral research, Jakub is currently developing a new project focused on 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 contemporaneous developments in vicarious employer liability in English law 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 established view that the nineteenth century saw the universalisation of the doctrine of strict employer liability which insulated employees from personal responsibility.
Research
Research Interests
Jakub’s research adopts a critical and socio-legal approach to explore the relationship between environmental law and capitalism, both historically and in the present. He is currently starting a large archival project on to the regulation of industrial pollution in Victorian Britain, writing a paper on the relationship between enclosure and the protection of wildlife in colonial Africa, and thinking about the role of critical legal scholarship in the fight for environmental justice.
Publications
- ‘The regulation of industrial smoke pollution in Victorian Britain: understanding the role of class conflict in the history of environmental law’ International Journal of Law in Context (2026) 22 (2) 321–339
- ‘John Bellamy Foster: The Dialectics of Ecology: Socialism and Nature’ Filozofia (2024) 79 (9) 1058 – 1061
- ‘Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism, By Kohei Saito, Published by Cambridge University Press, 2023, 300 pp.’ Review of European, Comparative & International Environmental Law (2024) 33 (2) 336 – 339
Teaching
Engagement and impact
‘Skutočne sa kradne viac? O trestnom populizme’ (Kapitál, 26 November 2025)
‘Liberalizmus bez demokracie’ (Kapitál, 3 March 2025)
‘Slovenské záujmy v Jadarskom údolí’ (Kapitál, 16 December 2024)
‘Assassination Attempt Prompts Soul-Searching in Slovakia’ (Jacobin Magazine, 20 May 2024)
‘Slovakia’s Election Result Is About Declining Living Standards, Not Just Ukraine’ (Jacobin Magazine, 10 October 2023)
‘For Slovakia’s Left, Welfare Spending and Nationalism Make an Awkward Match’ (Jacobin Magazine, 5 September 2023)