People

Philippa Collins is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Bristol. After completing her doctorate at the University of Oxford, she now researches and teaches Employment Law. Her research focuses on the relationship between human rights and employment law mechanisms, and she has published a leading monograph, Putting Human Rights to Work: Labour Law, the ECHR and the Employment Relation, on this topic. Her current project examines the protection of labour rights and fundamental rights in an era of algorithmic management and in the light of increased use of technology in the workplace.

Jorge is a Lecturer in Law and a PhD candidate at the University of Bristol. His research is focused on Freedom of Association and the right to organise, with particular emphasis on the challenges presented by new forms of work and the consequent emergence of alternative forms of worker organisation. As part of the global team of the Fairwork project, Jorge contributes to the creation of their yearly report about working conditions in the Chilean platform economy. He occasionally teaches collective and comparative labour law for postgraduate programmes in Chile. Before arriving in the UK, Jorge practised and taught labour law in Chile for several years. His teaching at Bristol spans labour law in undergraduate and graduate courses, as well as public law and human rights.

Diego Acosta’s work examines migration law at international, regional and national level. He analyses the legal construction of the foreigner through law, including the rights non-nationals obtain in the work sphere, mostly in Europe and South America.

Katie Bales is an Associate Professor in Law at the University of Bristol. Her research mainly focuses on labour law, welfare, and irregular migration. Specifically, Katie has researched into the legal implications of immigration raids in the workplace, the labour of immigration detainees, and the shortcomings of the Taylor Review. Katie’s most recent project centres on unfree forms of state enforced labour, including that of prison labour, workfare, community payback and immigration detention.

Alan Bogg joined the Bristol Law School in 2017 as Professor of Labour Law. Previously he was Professor of Labour Law in the University of Oxford and a fellow of Hertford College, Oxford. His current research projects are examining freedom of association; common law fundamental rights; the role of criminalisation in work relations; and the future of the social democratic constitution.

Jennifer Collins researches in the area of criminal law and criminal justice. Her research adopts a doctrinal and theoretical approach to contemporary criminal law problems. Her research has focused on the role of criminalisation in work relations. Current research projects include the changing nature of fraud and the use of artificial technologies in the criminal justice system.

Katie Cruz joined the law school in August 2016, having previously lectured at Keele University and the University of Leeds. She is a socio-legal scholar with a commitment to feminist and Marxist approaches to the law. Katie currently teaches undergraduate modules in Law & State, Sex, Gender and Law, and Socio-Legal Studies, and postgraduate modules in Social & Legal Theory and Law, Gender and Sexuality. She has previously taught modules in Contract law, Labour law, and Migration and Work.

Joanne Conaghan has researched extensively in the field of labour law with a particular emphasis on gender issues, work/life balance and theories of labour law.

Manoj Dias-Abey is a socio-legal scholar who is mainly interested in new labour organizations and movements of low-waged workers. His related research focus is the law and political economy of labour migration. Manoj holds Master of Laws (Research), Bachelor of Laws, and Bachelor of Arts degrees from the University of New South Wales (Sydney, Australia). He completed his Ph.D. at Queen’s University (Canada) in 2016 where he was also a Postdoctoral Fellow from 2016-2018. His dissertation examined the work of three labour organizations active in representing farm workers in the United States and Canada.

Anamaria is currently a teaching associate in law at the University of Bristol. Her research focuses on forced migration, ethnicity, integration, citizenship and the hostile environment for immigrants, sex work, right to work for migrants, women's rights, intersectionality and Marxist feminism. It explores the intricacies of the decriminalisation and regulation of sex work, exploring the possible implications for the well-being and rights of sex workers. Through her research, she aims to contribute to clarifying the multifaceted issues surrounding the labour rights of migrants, especially those who have been forcibly displaced, as well as contributing to the ongoing discourse on the decriminalisation and regulation of sex work. Her general research interests lie at the intersection of human rights, migration and labour markets, with a particular focus on the right to work for migrants in hostile immigration environments.

Paula Giliker works on vicarious liability, which is obviously related to the workplace in terms of employers' liability for the torts of their employees and, more recently, a broader notion of what we mean by 'employment' and a separation between the concept of employment in tort and that in employment and social security law.

Dr Jacopo Martire’s research is focused on legal and political theory. He is currently exploring the issue of socio-political integration of migrant workers within the context of Free Movement Regimes and Global Migration Law.

Tonia Novitz is Professor of Labour Law at the University of Bristol. Her research interests focus predominantly on labour law, international and EU trade and the protection of human rights. A graduate of the University of Canterbury (Christchurch, New Zealand) and Balliol College, Oxford, Tonia Novitz has held fellowships at the International Institute for Labour Studies (Geneva), the European University Institute (Florence), the University of Melbourne and the University of Auckland. She has been a professor at Bristol since 2008. She is also a member of the executive committee of the Institute of Employment Rights and the Industrial Law Society. She is an honorary member of Old Square Chambers (based in Bristol and London).

Ken Oliphant's research interests include the law of employers' liability and compensation for work-related illness and injury. He is the joint editor of a wide-ranging comparative survey of these issues, as well as having addressed no-fault compensation for work accidents and disease in his wider research on no-fault compensation for incapacity.

Devyani Prabhat’s work on citizenship and immigration focusses on rights and capabilities and adopts a categorical lens using class, race, gender and age as relevant categories for inter-disciplinary analysis of the law. Dr Prabhat is interested in various macro-political issues which impact on immigration and nationality laws such the role of lawyers and the legal profession, issues of national security, economic and political constraints on work and voting, and the commitments made towards various categories of migrants. For instance, she looks at rights of migrant children and youth, settlement/citizenship rights for long term resident workers and their families and the impact of precarious legal status on various kinds of migrants.

Oliver Quick is interested in law and regulation within the health care workplace. He has a special interest in patient safety and how various legal mechanisms impact on the ability of professionals and organisations to deliver safer care. This includes the work of professional regulators (such as the General Medical Council) and the use of civil and criminal law as a response to failure of medical work. His recently published monograph 'Regulating Patient Safety: the End of Professional Dominance' (CUP, 2017) explores the experiences of healthcare professionals who have raised concerns about safety problems at work.

Roseanne Russell is a lecturer in law whose research focuses on labour law, corporate governance and gender equality. She is particularly interested in women’s treatment, progression and representation within the corporate workplace. Her latest publication explores corporate governance and transnational business feminism, to be published in Creating Corporate Sustainability: Gender as an Agent for Change (2018, Cambridge University Press). She is currently working on two research projects: the first explores unconscious bias and whether the law should provide a remedy for the harms it causes, the second examines multi-national companies and their engagement with gender empowerment projects.

My research looks at a number of issues crosscutting the problem of work and global political economy, focussing specifically on social transformations in eastern Europe in the context of European integration. My current research project looks at the nexus between social reproduction and labour migration, examining a range of social problems concerning Polish and Ukrainian migrant workers in the UK and Germany employed in the food, housing and care sectors. . I have worked with Ukrainian and Polish trade unions, the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in both countries as well as contribute to the ILO’s Regulating for DecentWork Network to share knowledge and better inform policy at national and transnational levels.

Yana Simutina is a Senior Research Fellow at Koretsky Institute of State and Law of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and Professor of Labour Law at the National Technical University of Ukraine “Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute”. Her research interests encompass labour law and social rights in the digital era, non-standard forms of working, and the scope of labour law in the gig economy. Since the 1st of September 2022, she has been a visiting professor at the University of Bristol Law School for two years under the Researches at Risk Fellowships Programme established by the UK National Academies with Cara (the Council for At-Risk Academics). Her current project examines martial law’s impact on labour rights and relations, in particular, the experience of Ukraine after the russian invasion on the 24th of February 2022.

Phil Syrpis is an EU lawyer, interested in EU internal market law, and in particular in the relationship between 'the economic' and 'the social' in that context.

Asma Vranaki is law lecturer at the University of Bristol. She is an empirical scholar who interrogates the links between law, society and innovative digital technologies. In particular, she is interested in the legal and regulatory challenges raised by the Gig Economy including worker status, zero contract hours and the obligations of employers in the ‘on-demand’ economy.

Professor Charlotte Villiers specialises in Company Law and Corporate Governance and she also has an interest in Labour and Employment Law. In her early career she qualified as a Solicitor, and specialised in Employment Law at Clifford Chance in London, having trained at Simmons & Simmons. She moved to the University of Sheffield for her first academic position and worked also at the University of Glasgow and as a visiting professor at the University of Oviedo before joining the University of Bristol Law School. Her research interests cover all aspects of company law and corporate governance, and she focuses also on the interactions between company law and labour law. She has been involved in several international research projects, including the Company Law and Sustainability research project which was led by the University of Oslo. She is a Member of the Daughters of Themis Women Business Scholars Network and is a founding Member of the Sustainability Law Research Group based at the University of Oslo.

Yefan Xu is interested in Company Law and Corporate Governance, in particular, worker participation in company decision-making process by conducting doctrinal, social-legal and comparative research between different legal systems. Yefan completed PhD in Law and Master of International Commercial Law at the University of Bristol, and obtained her Bachelor of International Economic Law from the Dalian Maritime University. Recently, Yefan successfully presented a case study on Royal Mail at the SLS 2024 Conference. The case study shows how company law, corporate governance and labour law interact and the paper reflects on a liberal regulatory corporate governance framework which still, in practice, ensures that short-term shareholder value is the guiding force and the workforce and other stakeholders are given little more than tokenistic respect.

Thomas is an ESRC-funded student undertaking socio-legal doctoral research as part of an SWDTP supported studentship. He holds an LLM in Labour Law and Corporate Governance and an MSc in Socio-Legal Studies, from the University of Bristol. Thomas’ doctoral research is on human rights due diligence regulation, with a particular focus on workers’ access to freedom of association and collective bargaining in global garment supply chains.

Maggie Fannon is a PhD student researching sex work and labour law through a Marxist-feminist lens. Her thesis looks into the potential for improving sex workers’ working conditions using the ILO’s Decent Work Agenda. She has taught in the areas of employment law and contract law.

Lara is a socio-legal scholar whose doctoral research interests lie in the political economy of labour unfreedom, worker voice and participatory methodologies. Lara is currently working with Focus on Labour Exploitation (FLEX), overseeing a Participatory Action Research project with workers in precarious employment across several sectors in the UK. The project aims to support and empower workers to gather evidence on exploitation and engage in policy advocacy.

Stu completed his undergraduate studies in Law at Lancaster University in 2020, masters in Employment, Work, and Equality Law at the University of Bristol in 2022, and masters in Human Resources Management and Industrial Relations at the University of Manchester in 2024. His doctoral research looks at the rights of employees and the responsibilities of employers with regard to mental ill health and psychosocial risk in the workplace.

Maja Rogozik is a European Union law teaching assistant and PhD student. She holds a Master of Laws from the National University of Singapore. Her doctorate research focuses on the comparative analysis of labour and migration laws in the UK and Singapore. Specifically, she focuses on gender related issues and women's rights.

Diego Villavicencio-Pinto is a lawyer and completed a Master in Labour and Social Security Law at the University of Talca (Chile, 2021). Prior to his arrival in Bristol, he worked as a lecturer in labour law in Chile (UCSH). His research interests are related to the labour phenomenon analysed from a multidisciplinary approach. He is currently conducting his doctoral research on the right to profit-sharing and its effects on the labour identity of workers.

Anne Davies is the Dean of the Oxford Law Faculty and Professor of Law and Public Policy. Her interests in the labour law field are wide-ranging, encompassing international, European and domestic law. Her current research focuses on job security and issues surrounding casual work and working time.

Professor Keith Ewing is Professor of Public Law at King's College London. He has written extensively on labour law including recognition procedures and international standards. He is also the President of the Institute of Employment Rights.

Professor Judy Fudge is a Professor in the School for Labour Studies at McMaster University, Ontario, Canada. She was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2013 for her contribution to labour law scholarship. Her research interests include labour and employment law (Canadian, UK, European, and International), immigration and work, precarious work and human rights and citizenship at work. She is currently working on a project on unfree labour , modern slavery and labour exploitation that explores the relationship between legal characterization and jurisdiction and capitalist labour markets. Recent publications relating to this project include: ‘Why Labour Lawyers Should Care About the Modern Slavery Act 2015’, King'sLaw Journal, (2019) DOI: 10.1080/09615768.2018.1549699 ‘Illegal Working, Migrants and Labour Exploitation in the UK’ 38(3) Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 557-584 (2018).

Julia Lopez is Professor of Labour Law and Social Security Law at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona and researcher in the research group for labour and social security law GREDTiSS. She is also member of the steering committee of the Labour Law Research Network and has recently participated in research projects on precarious work and social rights led by the Working Lives Research Institute (London Metropolitan University).

Jason Moyer-Lee currently works as a Visiting Professor at University College London. He has formerly worked as the Director of Labor Standards at the Maine Department of Labor. Before that, he has spent just under a decade in the trade union movement, including over seven years in elected leadership roles at the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB), a leading trade union for precarious, “gig economy”, and migrant workers. During that time membership grew from a few hundred to over 5,400 (including cleaners, foster care workers, Uber drivers, couriers, video game workers, and others). Jason developed and oversaw the union's strategic litigation, which included bringing cases over (limb b) worker status as well as cases challenging the government on workers' rights. Jason Moyer-Lee is a Practitioner Fellow at Georgetown University's Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor and he is writing a book on effective activism.

Hannah Reed is the Co-ordinator of Constitutional Affairs at Unite the Union. Before that she was the National Officer and Team Leader in the Employment Relations Department at the Royal College of Nursing (RCN). Before joining the RCN, Hannah worked at the TUC and was responsible for developing and promoting TUC policy on individual employment rights and trade union rights in the UK and the EU. Hannah served on the ILC Committee on the Application of Standards (2017-18) and is a former Member of the UK Gangmasters Licensing Authority Board. She is a member of the Executive Committee at the Institute of Employment Rights and has served on the Executive Committee Member of the Industrial Law Society.

Professor Alysia Blackham is an Associate Professor at Melbourne Law School, the University of Melbourne and a member of the Centre for Employment and Labour Relations Law at Melbourne Law School. Alysia’s research interests centre on age discrimination law and the consequences of ageing for workplaces, using empirical evidence to cast new light on legal problems. Alysia’s current research considers the way technology might address or exacerbate inequality at work.

Ricardo is currently a Lecturer and Course Director in Employment Law at the University of Manchester. Ricardo is also a trained Chilean lawyer in labour law (non-practising). He holds an LLM in Economic Law from the University of Chile School of Law and an LLM in International Law from the Universities of Chile and Heidelberg. Ricardo also holds a PhD from the University of Bristol Law School. His main research areas are UK and EU labour and competition law.

Serena studied Law at the University of Bristol. She previously worked as a research assistant on domestic and comparative employment law for Alan Bogg. She is currently a barrister at Old Square Chambers where she has a particular focus on employment law.

Dr. Natalia Delgado is a lecturer at the Law School, University of Southampton. Her research combines International Law, Labour Law, and Political Economy. Natalia obtained her LLB and qualified as a barrister in Argentina and graduated with a Master's in International and European Law from the University of Geneva. She has a background working with trade unions, union federations, and the International Labour Organization. She completed her Ph.D. at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her dissertation analysed how the ILO, the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund have conceptualised labour since the 1970s.

Franz is a Research Officer in Labour Law at the Research Department of the International Labour Organisation in Geneva. His research is located at the intersection of transnational labour law, economic governance, and human rights law. Previously, he worked for nine years as a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg and was a visiting professional at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. Franz was also a visiting researcher at Columbia Law School and at the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law at the University of Cambridge. He has advised several international organisations, governments, and civil society organizations and has appeared before committees of the European Parliament and the German Parliament.

Dr Gabrielle Golding is a Senior Lecturer in Law at The University of Adelaide. She is an internationally recognised researcher and commentator on employment and contract law. Her latest work includes 'Shaping Contracts for Work: The Normative Influence of Terms Implied by Law' (Oxford University Press, 2023), which was shortlisted for the UK Society of Legal Scholars 2024 Peter Birks Prizes.

Ioannis is a Senior Researcher in European Social and Labour Law at the European Trade Union Institute and a Senior Lecturer in Employment Law at the University of Sussex. He holds an LL.B (First Class) from University of Athens and an M. Jur, M. Phil (Distinction) and D. Phil in Law from University of Oxford. Ioannis has undertaken research in the field of collective labour rights at national, comparative, European and international levels and has been the author (or co-author) of reports for the European Parliament, ILO and ETUI. His current research focuses on labour rights and authoritarianism and the EU acquis on information and consultation.

Polly Lord is a socio-legal researcher and associate at Frederick Place Chambers, a specialist labour law chambers in Bristol. Her main research interests lie in agricultural labour and the application of statutory employment law rights in practice. Her work is interdisciplinary in nature and she uses a range of empirical and theoretical techniques drawn from the social sciences to evaluate the effectiveness of law and policy.

Jack is a Lecturer in Law at the University of Leeds. He was previously an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Bristol having completed his PhD in Law at the University of Glasgow. His research interests sit at the intersection between legal/constitutional theory, socio-legal studies, and labour law. His most recent work draws on legal theoretical and socio-legal insights to comprehend how labour movements use law strategically in the context of industrial relations. In August 2022, he will begin a two-year ESRC New Investigator Grant, undertaking research on the project: ‘TRACTION Trasnnational Labour Constitutionalism: Strategic Litigation and the Constitutional Protection of Work.’

Tony Prosser’s interests are regulation, both economic and social. For example, his book 'The Regulatory Enterprise' had a chapter on the Health and Safety Executive, and he has also studied rail franchising as a form of regulation, and one which has been central to recent industrial action on the railways.

Inga Thiemann works as an Associate Professor at the University of Leicester. She is a socio-legal scholar whose main research focus is in the areas of sex work and trafficking for sexual exploitation, as well as feminised labour, care work and domestic work, as well as the interplay of migration law and labour exploitation. Her work uses a combination of theoretical, empirical and doctrinal methods. She is currently running a qualitative pilot study for her new project, in which she explores avenues of reconciling sex workers’ regulatory needs and preferences with existing legal concepts in employment and self-employment regulation. In the pilot, she addresses this issue in the Israeli context, as part of a visiting fellowship at TraffLab, Tel Aviv University.

Darcy du Toit is an Emeritus Professor of the University of the Western Cape and former Dean of Law, currently acting as research coordinator of the Centre for Transformative Regulation of Work in the University’s Faculty of Law and a consultant at Bradley Conradie Halton Cheadle Attorneys in Cape Town, South Africa. He completed his BA, LLB degrees at the University of Cape Town and his doctorate at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. He has published in South Africa and other countries on various aspects of employment and labour law, focusing most recently on domestic work, strike law, discrimination law and work in the digital economy in a context of promoting social justice.

Alex is an Assistant Professor in Economic Sociology at the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on the impact of technology on labour relations and labour markets. His most recent research has investigated worker voice, organisation and collective action in the gig economy as part of the iLabour project at the University of Oxford. Previously he researched the impact of platform work and the gig economy on Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia as part of the “Microwork and Virtual Production Networks in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia” project. His PhD in sociology (University of Cambridge, 2016) focused on the consequences of precarious scheduling for working conditions and workplace control and is published by Cornell University Press as 'Despotism On Demand: How Power Operates in the Flexible Workplace.

Charles Wynn-Evans is a partner at and International General Counsel of Dechert LLP, having specialised since qualification as a solicitor in 1992 in employment law, advising both employers and employees. He previously served as a fee paid employment judge and deputy chair of the Central Arbitration Committee. He read law at the University of Bristol, studied for the Bachelor of Civil Law at Merton College, Oxford, and in 2022, supervised by Professor Alan Bogg, was awarded a Ph.D by published work by the University of Bristol. He has written extensively for both academic and practitioner publications on a wide variety of labour and employment law issues with a particular focus on transfer of undertakings legislation and is the author of “The Law of TUPE Transfers” (Oxford University Press, 3rd edition, 2022).