Linda Mulcahy

Linda Mulcahy is the Professor of Socio-Legal Studies and the Director of the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies.  She has degrees in law, legal theory, sociology and art history and her work has a strong interdisciplinary flavour.  Linda has previously held posts at the LSE, Birkbeck, the Law Commission and Bristol University.  She has taken on a number of senior management roles including Head of Department, Dean of Arts, the inaugural Directorship of the LSE PhD Academy, Director of the LSE's ESRC Doctoral Training Partnership, and Head of MRes programmes. She specialises in dispute resolution and the ways in which lay users experience the legal system.  Linda has undertaken a number of empirical studies of disputes between business people in the car distribution industry, divorcing couples,  doctors and patients and neighbours on council estates. Her work has been funded by a range of bodies including the Economic and Social Research Council, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Nuffield Foundation, the Department of Health, the NHS Executive, the Leverhulme Trust and the Lotteries Board. 

Linda is currently undertaking research on how rights are explained to the public and an oral history of the law centres movement.  Together with Ellie Whittingdale she is also undertaking an oral history of the rape crisis movements.  Both oral history projects will result in the creation of two new collections to be held and maintained for the nation by National Life Stories at the British Library, where Linda is currently an expert adviser to the Board.  

Linda’s publications span a number of different topics including the socio-legal dynamics of disputes, the design  of law courts, feminist and relational perspectives on contract law, visual representations of law, legal methodology and digital justice.  Linda served  as an editor of the International Journal of Social and Legal Studies for ten years and is currently a member of the Advisory Boards of the Journal of Law and Society and the International Journal of Law in Context.

Linda was elected a Trustee of the US Law and Society Association from 2021-2024 and has played an active role in the UK Socio-Legal Studies Association.  She was elected  Chair of the SLSA for three years and has served twice as its Treasurer. She is currently involved in the development of socio-legal studies in Latin America where she has delivered plenary addresses at law and society annual conferences in both Chile and Brazil.  She is also a partner in a Chilean government initiative to further develop the field.  Linda has a particular interest in training and supporting research students and early career academics in order to build capacity in the field.  She was involved in the organisation of the SLSA annual postgraduate conference for over twenty years and now runs an annual methodology masterclass for research students which is funded by the ESRC. She co-convenes an early career workshop funded by Cambridge University Press every two years. While at the LSE Linda served as the Director of the ESRC Doctoral Training Partnership and subsequently took the lead in establishing the LSE PhD Academy, a multi-disciplinary advice and advanced training hub. At Oxford she teaches on the methodology course run by the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies and has also set up a new course on qualitative methodology for lawyers.  Linda established, and is lead editor of Frontiers of Socio-Legal Studies, a blog and podcast series aimed at early career scholars who are new to the field.  Her podcast series on methodology has been ranked amongst the top ten educational podcasts in the UK.

Linda regularly acts as a research consultant to government bodies, regulators and NGOs and has worked closely with the the Access to Justice Foundation, Public Law Project, JUSTICE, the Howard League for Penal Reform and the Law Centres Network.  Linda is also a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.

Linda regularly travels around the world giving papers and has had Visiting Professor positions at the Faculty of Law in the University of Melbourne, the School of Architecture at the University of Technology in Sydney and the Australian National University in Canberra. Together with colleagues from the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies she recently ran a British Academy funded early career workshop in Johannesburg for emerging scholars from across Africa.

Linda was educated in the state sector and is the child of inspiring working class immigrants who felt passionately about others getting the education they had been denied.  This has given her a lifelong interest in widening participation and the ways in which epistemic injustice manifests itself.