School of Law

LLB (TCD), MA (UCC), LLM (Osgoode), DJur (Osgoode).

Ruth joined Keele in 1999 and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2005.  At Keele she has participated in a number of research projects, including as Associate Director of the AHRC Research Centre for Law, Gender and Sexuality (2004-9).  Ruth’s teaching and supervision are mainly in the areas of healthcare law and ethics, socio-legal studies, and gender, sexuality and law.  She has been a visiting fellow at the Centre for Feminist Legal Studies, Delhi; Cornell Law School; Queen’s University Belfast, and University College Cork, is also incoming Director of the Research Centre for Law, Ethics and Society, and has recently been the Postgraduate Research Director for the Social Sciences.

Research interests:

Ruth's  research is concerned with the relationship between law and reproduction from a critical socio-legal perspective.  This has produced a long-standing engagement with practical legal problems, such as struggles over abortion restrictions, and the imaginative ways in which people generate socio-legal solutions in restricted circumstances.  Her current work in this area (Peripheral Lives, a monograph in progress) investigates the significance of abortion travel strategies as a kind of transnational mobility, with a particular focus on the Irish case.

A second dimension of her research addresses a more theoretical interest in legal form and the different ways in which legality and governance reproduce themselves as they negotiate new content.  Recent work in this area reads classical Pashukanis-like distinctions between technocratic law and substantive law as dimensions of the one process, as reproduction becomes a matter of administration more than a matter of rights conflict (2013 forthcoming). 

A third theme of Ruth's research addresses the nexus between law and reproduction as a means of valuing care and embodiment.  In the past this has produced collaborative work arguing for a methodological shift in medical law (2008).   At present, our AHRC ReValuing Care Network is focused on generating new approaches to care through a dialogue between academics, activists and advocates. 

Past major projects:

Constituting Markets and Transnational Social Networks: Support for Irish Clients of British Abortion Services since 1992 (ESRC small grants 2004-6, 45k) Revisiting the Theory/Practice Divide in Gender, Sexuality and Law, with Kent and Westminster. (ESRC seminar series, £15k).Key Concepts in Feminist Legal Theory, with the Feminism and Legal Theory Project, Emory University (British Academy Networks £15k).

AHRC Research Centre for Law, Gender and Sexuality (2004-9)  http://www.kent.ac.uk/clgs/

Gender, Sexuality and Law Interchange, Leverhulme 2000-2003

Postgraduate Research Supervision (PhD students)

 Sue Westwood, Ageing, Sexuality and Equality: The experiences of Older Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual People

Forough Ramezankhah, Asylum Claims and Asylum Stories

Sameena Dalwai, Performing Caste: The Ban on Bar-Dancing in Mumbai, submitted and passed in 2012.

Nik Salida Suhaila Nik Saleh, The Women's Convention and Malaysian Laws on Muslim Women's Rights: The Possibility of Harmonisation, submitted in 2012 (second supervisor)

Mary Ewert (PhD 2010), Adolescent Citizenship: Reproductive privacy, welfare and regulation

Nicola Barker (PhD 2009), Not the Marrying Kind: Feminist Critiques of Marriage and the Legal Recognition of Same-Sex Relationships (co-supervisor)

Jane Krishnadas (PhD 2005), Reconstructing Rights in a Post-Disaster Context.

Postgraduate Teaching:

LLM in Law and Society

MA in Medical Ethics and Law

MA in Childcare Law and Practice

Undergraduate Teaching:

Healthcare law

Law and Ethics

Law, Science and Society

Ruth is a member of the AHRC Peer Review College and of the Editorial Board of Feminist Legal Studies