Social justice at the Liverpool

We have a distinctive approach to how we teach and research law at the School of Law and Social Justice at the University of Liverpool. In all we do, we advance the role of law in shaping society for the better. We provide the intellectual underpinning needed to do law in a way in which people matter; human rights are centre stage, equality is advanced and access to justice is fundamental. These are high expectations and ideals, and of course, in everyday life, the law is not perfect – and enable our students to understand how the law fails as well as to understand how it succeeds because we support our students to develop their own opinions about how to make the law better for the future.

The values associated with social justice drives not just what we do, but how we do it: our approach to student and staff recruitment and support, as well as our research priorities, methods and partnerships, seek to promote equality, inclusion, fairness, opportunity and transparency.

We forge and maintain ethical strategic partnerships with external bodies to ensure that the impacts resulting from our research pursues clear social justice goals and our internationalisation strategy (s.1.3) responds to broader social justice concerns around decolonising research agendas and ensuring inclusive international research collaborations.

A legal education focused on social justice is one of intellectual challenge because our approach sets law within its wider social context and asks students to consider really big questions about why and how the law matters, the significance of speaking truth to power, of holding officials and institutions to account, of widening access to justice and of eradicating prejudice.

Our mission as a law school is to nurture the next generation of lawyers, to have a positive influence on legal development through our research as well as our teaching and to recognise that, although some students will choose career paths outside of the legal profession, all our students have the talent and capacity to shape society, to inspire global dialogues, to influence local communities, to lead businesses, to innovate.