The Bristol Socio-Legal Centre invites you to the Inaugural Annual Janine Sargoni Memorial Lecture: Radical Lawyers? Rethinking the law and society canon, with guest speaker Professor Linda Mulcahy. 

In this talk Professor Mulcahy will draw on a four year oral history of law centre lawyers to interrogate what we know, and think we know, about progressive lawyering. Revisiting the focus of scholarship on the heroic test case and pro bono work, it will argue that the English and Welsh experience of salaried full time poverty lawyers suggest that there are many ways in which repressive laws can be challenged and systemic change achieved. Situated within discussions of localism, collective working and parity of esteem with community workers, this paper will challenge theories of radical lawyering that place the lawyer and national test case at the core.

Professor Mulcahy is a multi-disciplinary researcher with an interest in marginalised stories about law and justice. Across her career she has undertaken hundreds of interviews with victims of medical negligence, council flat tenants, food bank users and radical lawyers. In recent years she has written about the architecture of law courts, the representation of law and justice in the public sphere and street art. Professor Mulcahy is the Director of the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies and the Statutory Chair of Socio-Legal Studies at the University of Oxford. She has a particular interest in methodology, radical listening and narrative interviews. Professor Mulcahy is an expert adviser to the British Library Life Stories programme.