Antonia Layard

Antonia’s research interests are in law and geography where she explores how law, legality and spatiality construct places and experiences. She focuses on planning, property and nature conservation law, particularly "everyday nature" and the overlap between social deprivation and nature conservation. Antonia is writing For Public Space: A Legal Geography (OUP, 2026), which uses socio-legal and geographical methods to analyse how law structures access, control and conflict within public spaces.  

She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences as well as an Academic Member of both the AHRC and ESRC Peer Review Colleges. She has undertaken a number of research projects with NGOs, particularly in relation to children, public space and buses, funded by the AHRC, the ESRC, the University of Bristol and the British Academy. She is an advocate of free buses for children, particularly for children living with economic deprivation. This case is most persuasively in a film made by children at Room 13, as part of The Bus Project.

Antonia is on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Law, Property and Society and was on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Law and Society (2010-2020). She was a trustee at the Socio-Legal Studies Association for several years, acting as Vice Chair (2019-21). Antonia is also an academic member of the AHRC and the ESRC Peer Review Colleges.