Erika Rackley

ERIKA RACKLEY joined Birmingham Law School as Professor of Law in September 2014, having previously taught at the Universities of Kent, Leicester and Durham. Her research has been supported by awards from the AHRC, ESRC, British Council, Philip Leverhulme Trust, Australian Research Council, Society of Legal Scholars and Socio-Legal Studies Association. In 2015, she was a British Academy Mid-Career Fellow during which time she worked on a multi-disciplinary project examining the changing position of women in law.
She has been a visiting scholar at Emory Law School (Atlanta GA), the University of British Columbia (Vancover, Canada), and Osgoode Hall Law School (Toronto, Canada).
Erika Rackley's primary core undergraduate teaching interest is tort law, which she has led and taught at a number of institutions. She is co-author a leading textbook in this field for Oxford University Press (Tort Law, 5th edn, 2017) and has recently taken over co-authorship of Kidner’s Casebook on Torts (14th edn, 2017). She has also led and taught a number of law and gender modules at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Topics on these modules have included the legal regulation of abortion, surrogacy, lesbian motherhood, same-sex partnerships, transgender rights, feminist judgment-writing and diversity in the legal professions/judiciary.). In 2014, she was awarded a prestigious Phillip Leverhulme Prize for her achievements in the field of law.
Erika Rackley has written widely on judicial diversity and judging, particularly in relation to the representation of women and the importance of difference-based arguments in the context of judicial diversity. Her book, Women, Judging and the Judiciary: From Difference to Diversity, won the Society of Legal Scholars Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship in 2013.