Anne Davies

Anne Davies is Professor of Law and Public Policy and a Fellow of Brasenose College. She studied at Oxford, completing the BA (winning the Gibbs and Martin Wronker Prizes) and the D.Phil. She was a Prize Fellow at All Souls College from 1995 to 2001, and the Garrick Fellow and Tutor in Law at Brasenose College from 2001 to 2015. From 2015-2020 she was Dean of the Oxford Law Faculty. 

Professor Davies is the author of five books and numerous articles in the fields of public law and labour/employment law. In public law, she has a particular interest in government contracts. Her D.Phil. thesis examined the phenomenon of contractualisation in the UK National Health Service from a public law perspective. She developed this research into a book entitled Accountability: A Public Law Analysis of Government by Contract which was published by Oxford University Press in 2001. Her book The Public Law of Government Contracts, a wider examination of public procurement and public/private partnership contracts from a public law perspective, was published by OUP in 2008. She continues to write about government contracts and public service delivery more generally, and chairs the Procurement of Government Outcomes network for the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford. Her current focus is on the use of government contracts to enforce net zero targets through the SPARKS project funded by the John Fell Fund. 

In labour/employment law, Professor Davies is the author of three texts: Perspectives on Labour Law, published by Cambridge University Press in the Law in Context series in 2004, with a second edition in 2009, EU Labour Law, published by Elgar in 2012, and Employment Law, published by Pearson in 2015. Her interests in the employment law field are wide-ranging, encompassing international, European and domestic law. She is currently working on a project on remedies in employment law. Her book on this topic, Valuing Employment Rights, will be published by Hart in May 2024. 

Professor Davies gives lectures in Employment Law and Administrative Law for undergraduates and co-teaches the BCL/M.Jur. courses in Human Rights at Work and Advanced Administrative Law. She is pleased to consider applications from prospective research students in any of her areas of interest. 

She sits on the boards of Current Legal Problems, the European Labour Law Journal, the Industrial Law Journal, the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies and the Oxford Monographs in Labour Law series. She is Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Comparative Labour Law and Industrial Relations. Professor Davies is also the Honorary Secretary of the Society of Legal Scholars. 

Professor Davies is a non-executive member of the Board of the Parliamentary and Health Services Ombudsman, and a member of the Advisory Panel to the Welsh Language Commissioner. She previously served as an independent member of the Council of the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (ACAS).