research-news

Workshop on Horizontal Application of Human Rights

Wed, 06 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The Centre for Law, Policy and Society (CLPS) was delighted to welcome Elisabeth Ahlinder of the University of Stockholm to co-present a workshop with Sarah Nield on ‘Horizontality of the ECHR: Home Repossession and Article 8’. The workshop took place Monday 4th March and was well attended by Law School staff.

Transforming shipping across the world

Mon, 22 May 2017 00:00:00 +0100

Southampton researchers are taking a leading role in a multi-million euro project that could see a transformation of how the global shipping industry operates.

Quarterly Research Highlights

Fri, 30 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0100

Quarterly Research Highlights

Wed, 22 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0100

Quarterly Research Highlights

Fri, 04 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This page provides a spotlight on some of the most recent activity in the School of Law, with news about publications, speaking engagements and funded research over the last few months.

Quarterly Research Highlights

Wed, 09 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This page provides a spotlight on some of the most recent activity in the School of Law, with news about publications, speaking engagements and funded research over the last couple of months.

Dr Alexandros Ntovas participates in NATO Centre of Excellence proceedings

Through lively discussion and hands-on training, it examined relevant legal challenges facing the maritime law community and navies across multiple topic areas. This year the NATO Centre of Excellence increased the conference training program to provide additional learning opportunities for legal advisors and operators to improve their competence through numerous tabletop exercises, case studies, and fictional vignettes, which considered among other topics: Protection of Critical Infrastructure at Sea, Menace in the Red Sea Region, and New Developments in Autonomous and Unmanned Systems.

Dr Ntovas sat at the panel of ‘New Developments in Autonomous and Unmanned Systems’ and provided a panoptic view of the legal developments in the regulation of autonomous maritime systems from the European perspective, covering regulatory and project developments, including the potential impact of the recently adopted European Union Regulation 2024/1689 that lays down harmonised rules on artificial intelligence in providing developers and deployers with clear requirements and obligations regarding specific uses of Artificial Intelligence.

Dr Alexandros Ntovas delivers paper at the European Society of International Law

In his research paper, Dr Ntovas reflected on the recent decisions by the Legal Committee (111th session, 22-26 April 2024) and Maritime Safety Committee (108th session, 15-24 May 2024) to revise the International Maritime Organization’s road map for developing the Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships Code, which will be offered on a voluntary basis in 2025 and finally be adopted as a mandatory instrument by 2030 with proposed entry into force on 1 January 2032. He argued that, while the Code may address sufficiently the required changes in terms of making and applying future legislation that should not be inconsistent with the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea 1982 (UNCLOS), the ostensibly simple question is whether autonomous ships will meet the legal requirement of hu-manning. In the ensued analysis, he pointed out that in addition to the first two turns, namely first in approaching the law-making process by means of a flexible code and second in moving the substantive application of the law toward goal-based rules, international law will need to take a third turn by interpretating any UNCLOS requirement of human presence in light of the functional legal theory.

Dr Megan Pearson Presents at MLR Reproductive Life in the Workplace Seminar

This seminar brought together legal professionals, academics, students, and trade unionists to explore the complex legal challenges at the intersection of justice, employment law rights, and living a reproductive life in the workplace. Dr Pearson’s paper was on 'Work/Life Balance Rights: Foregrounding Care in Work?' and considered the greater priority given to work/life balance rights in the Employment Rights Bill currently going through Parliament.

The full programme of speakers from the seminar can be viewed here: https://www.northumbria.ac.uk/about-us/news-events/events/2024/12/modern-law-review---seminar/

Dr S Chelvan Awarded Honorary Doctorate from the Open University

Dr Chelvan practices from 33 Bedford Row Chambers, where he joined as Head of Immigration and Public Law in November 2020.

The Open University award of an Honourary Doctorate is in recognition of Dr Chelvan's "services to the educationally underprivileged. ... [N]ominated for this award as a result of [his] exceptional efforts to improve the welfare of LGBTQ+ people seeking asylum in the UK and from [his] research into refugee law based on gender and sexual identity. [Dr Chelvan's] works sits well with the ethos of the Open University here in the UK, where we are known for our innovation, flexibility, accessibility and social justice mission."

Dr Chelvan is recognised by the legal profession as the pre-eminent legal expert on LGBT asylum law in the UK. Dr Chelvan’s work demonstrates his commitment to the rule of law and to promoting the rights and welfare of some of the most marginalised members of our society.

Chelvan's acceptance speech can be viewed here: https://t.co/3Q3yyWTi4x

Congratulations Chelvan!

Dr Andrea Maria Pelliconi Visits Sahrawi Refugee Camps for Legal Status of Western Sahara Research

The Congress, themed “The Legal Status of Western Sahara and the Issue of Natural Resources,” brought together diplomats, jurists, academics, and representatives from national and international organisations to discuss the legal and political dimensions of the Western Sahara conflict. During her stay, Pelliconi visited key institutions in the camps, including the Parliament, schools, the central hospital, the Ministry of Equality (where she met with Minister Ms Salamo Aleycom), the Anti-Mine Association, the Association of the Families of Sahrawi Prisoners and Disappeared (AFAPREDESA), and the Museum of Resistance, among others. At the Congress, she contributed to discussions on the right to self-determination and independence in the African human rights system, the recent decision of the Court of Justice of the European Union on the Front Polisario II case, and climate vulnerability amid forced displacement.

This activity offered critical insights into the lived realities of the Sahrawi community and facilitated the development of academic and professional networks. It also strengthened engagement with research communities focused on international human rights, self-determination, and resource exploitation in conflict zones, raising awareness of human rights violations in Western Sahara. Pelliconi's participation was sponsored by the British Academy-Leverhulme Small Grant scheme.

SLS Death Penalty Casework Clinic Wins Champions of Justice Award

Staff and students have worked tirelessly performing document review on multiple death penalty cases, providing pro bono assistance to legal teams in the southern United States resulting in some exceptional outcomes. The DPCC, alongside the Centre for Justice Studies, recently hosted one of these teams for a lecture explaining just how impactful the work of DPCC volunteers has been in their cases. Students are able to volunteer for the DPCC across all undergraduate year groups, but must undergo a rigorous application and interview process overseen by Clinic Co-Directors Dr Rose Tempowski (Senior Teaching Fellow, SLS) and Mark Telford (Principal Teaching Fellow, SLS). Currently, 20 students are volunteering their time on a weekly basis and the Law School, through the Prof. Andrew Rutherford Capital Defence Bursary, has sponsored two recent graduates to undertake placements with capital defence teams in the United States.

Bestowed by Amicus, the award winners were selected by an independent panel comprising Professor Robin Maher (George Washington University, former Director of the ABA Death Penalty Representation Project); Dr Tunde Okewale OBE (Doughty Street Chambers) and HHJ Sarah Whitehouse KC (Central Criminal Court (Old Bailey)). The event featured a link up to Ohio's death row, with Keith LaMar sharing spoken word poetry accompanied by pianist Albert Marquès and Grammy award-winning saxophonist Jean Toussaint.

Dr S Chelvan Awarded Honorary Doctorate from the Open University

Congratulations Chelvan!

Dr Dina Lupin Awarded €1.3m for Home in Crisis Collaboration Project

This project engages with the idea of climate crisis as one that is unfolding inside our homes. In centring the idea of ‘home’, we examine the ways in which the climate crisis is lived and felt at home and we examine what home means in a state of climate crisis, in which one can be unhomed and rehomed, rendered homeless in one’s home, and homesick in one’s homeland.
Legal understandings of crisis tend to overlook the interconnected and overlapping nature of crises, their complex temporalities, their histories, and the fact that crises are personal and manifest in intimate spaces. By engaging in humanities-based approaches to law, we develop a novel and perspective-shifting understanding of the climate crisis in law. Using home as a lens through which to understand the climate crisis, allows us to better understand the ways in which the crisis is intimate, shaped by gender, location, community, age, disability, sexuality, and how we know and live in our homes. This perspective allows us to better see how limited legal understandings of home can create and exacerbate damaging experiences of crisis.

The project is a collaboration between researchers based in Norway, Denmark, Ireland and the United Kingdom, co-designed with partners and Indigenous researchers and activists in South Africa, Canada (Empatheatre and Protecting our Home) and a global environmental law charity (ClientEarth). Through this collaboration, we are developing and building arts and humanities based approaches to address law’s otherwise conceptually limited resources, and to enable legal systems to recognize the meanings of home that accommodate the breadth what is being changed, lost and damaged in climate crisis. The team will adopt an arts and humanities approach, rooted in theatre, literature, and Indigenous practice to enable the creative aspect of law, that might otherwise remain outside the normal jurisdiction of legal thought.
The project objectives are to reveal diverse understandings of home and the ways it is constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed in the context of the climate crisis. Home in Crisis will develop new understandings of the climate crisis, its impacts, and how those ought to be addressed within and beyond law and its systems.

Climate (Im)Mobility: Legal and Policy Pathways to Displacement and Entrapment in the Global Climate Emergency

We’ll have speakers from or based in Africa, Europe, Latin America, and the Pacific. The programme can be found here: Workshop Program - Climate ImMobilities 09 June 20_v2.docx. The workshop is sponsored by the Social & Legal Studies journal and the Southampton Law School. It is convened in collaboration with Sara Arapiles (University of Lund, Sweden), and 2025 Visiting Fellow at Oxford's Refugee Studies Centre and Pratik Purswani (Jindal Global Law School, India), who is a 2025 International Visiting Fellow with the Southampton's Institute for Arts and Humanities (SIAH) who will be joining in person. This workshop builds on a previous seminar on Climate Change and Migration organised last year at the University of Nottingham, sponsored by the Socio-Legal Studies Association. The papers will be published in a Special Issue of the Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies.

What can you do with a Law Degree?

If you’re thinking about studying law at university, you’re probably wondering where it could lead. Most people immediately picture courtrooms, robes, and legal dramas. That’s certainly one possibility. But law is much broader than that. It’s a subject that gives you the tools to think clearly, argue well, and understand how society functions. It opens up a wide range of career paths. Whether you want to become a solicitor or barrister, work in government or policy, join a business or start your own, a law degree gives you a solid academic foundation and the flexibility to go in many different directions.

A law degree doesn’t limit your future — it opens it up. Whether your interests lie in business, politics, international development or beyond, the intellectual training law provides is widely respected and highly transferable.

Kirsty McDougall, Lecturer in Law, University of Southampton; specialist in competition law

‘Renters’ Rights – Understanding the impact of new legislation

The event ‘Renters’ Rights – Understanding the impact of new legislation’ provided an opportunity to learn how upcoming legislation for the private rented housing sector will impact the role and actions for housing authorities in the region. The new Bill aims to transform the experience of private renting and will be the biggest change for the sector in decades.

Delegates from nearly all local authorities in the Hampshire and the Solent region were able to acquire insights from several legal and housing experts, including a representative of Government in the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG), who ensured that participants were up to date and empowered to navigate the upcoming legislation.

Sue Littlemore, Director Civic University, said:

The challenge of ensuring high quality private rented housing is a real issue for local
authorities across Hampshire and the Solent. As a Civic University for the region, we aim to
mobilise our outstanding research expertise and insights to help transform lives and
livelihoods across our area. Our local authority partners tell us unsafe, unhealthy and
unpleasant living conditions blight the lives of too many in our region and we were
delighted to bring academic and sector experts together with local authorities to learn how
together we can address the challenge.

Professor Helen Carr, Professor of Property Law & Social Justice, commented:

The Renters’ Rights Bill when enacted will implement the biggest transformation of the
relationship between landlords and tenants since the 1980s. The Bill places extensive
responsibilities on local authorities. This conference helped bring home the scale of the
challenge but also provided a positive opportunity for attendees to hear how the University
of Southampton can provide help with our extensive expertise in housing, homelessness
and property law.

Samantha Hall, Head of Housing & Environmental Health, Test Valley Borough Council
added:

The Renters’ Rights Bill is an opportunity to transform the private rented sector, setting
decent home standards and creating more stability. The proposed changes are significant,
it is important to us to support both landlords and tenants to understand their new
responsibilities and continue to have a thriving private rented sector. This event provided
great knowledge sharing which will help shape our delivery plans as well as enabling me to
connect with others across the region who will be working through the same challenges.

The event builds on existing work between the University of Southampton’s School of Law and Southampton City Council, with the University providing expertise into their scrutiny inquiry on the private rented sector in the city. Further work with other authorities is hoped to follow on after this session.

Research Workshop on AI, Equality and the Law

Call for Abstracts:

Themes and questions

We welcome submissions that engage with the broad theme of AI, Equality and the Law. Papers may address, but need not be limited to, the following themes and questions:

Women, Equality and AI:

feminist perspectives on AI ethics and governance; gendered impacts of AI in the context of reproductive health, domestic work, or caregiving.

Labour market inequality and AI:

the distributive impacts of workplace AI; the regulation of platform work and algorithmic management; algorithms and the right to equal pay for equal work.

AI as a solution to inequality:

applying AI to achieve equality through accountability, transparency, and explainability in AI systems.

AI and discrimination:

AI and its relationship to any form of discrimination; intersectionality and AI; de-colonial approaches to AI governance and accountability; racialised impacts and uses of AI; challenges and opportunities of AI for securing disability justice.

Submission Guidelines

The organising committee invites abstract submissions (max 500 words) to scclaw@soton.ac.uk
The deadline for submission is 5th Jan 2026.
Acceptance decisions will be communicated by the end of January.

Further information

There is no fee for attending the workshop. Limited travel and accommodation expenses may be available for participants who lack access to institutional funds.

For any queries, please contact the Conference Organizing Committee at scclaw@soton.ac.uk

Dr Megan Pearson Presents at MLR Reproductive Life in the Workplace Seminar

The full programme of speakers from the seminar can be viewed here: https://www.northumbria.ac.uk/about-us/news-events/events/2024/12/modern-law-review---seminar/

research-news

Workshop on Horizontal Application of Human Rights

Transforming shipping across the world

Quarterly Research Highlights

Quarterly Research Highlights

Quarterly Research Highlights

Quarterly Research Highlights

Dr Alexandros Ntovas participates in NATO Centre of Excellence proceedings

Dr Alexandros Ntovas delivers paper at the European Society of International Law

Dr Megan Pearson Presents at MLR Reproductive Life in the Workplace Seminar

Dr S Chelvan Awarded Honorary Doctorate from the Open University

Dr Andrea Maria Pelliconi Visits Sahrawi Refugee Camps for Legal Status of Western Sahara Research

SLS Death Penalty Casework Clinic Wins Champions of Justice Award

Dr S Chelvan Awarded Honorary Doctorate from the Open University

Dr Dina Lupin Awarded €1.3m for Home in Crisis Collaboration Project

Climate (Im)Mobility: Legal and Policy Pathways to Displacement and Entrapment in the Global Climate Emergency

What can you do with a Law Degree?

‘Renters’ Rights – Understanding the impact of new legislation

Research Workshop on AI&comma; Equality and the Law

Call for Abstracts:

Themes and questions

Women, Equality and AI:

Labour market inequality and AI:

AI as a solution to inequality:

AI and discrimination:

Submission Guidelines

Further information

Dr Megan Pearson Presents at MLR Reproductive Life in the Workplace Seminar

Research Workshop on AI, Equality and the Law