SLSA E‐Newsletter
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6478.2012.00577.x |
| Date | 01 March 2012 |
| Published date | 01 March 2012 |
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11
Newsletter
Socio-Legal
No 65
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The SLSA is delighted to announce that this year’s winner
of the SLSA Prize for Contributions to the Socio-Legal
Community is Mavis Maclean.
Mavis has nurtured the careers of generations of socio-legal
scholars, particularly in the family law area. She has been an
amazing mentor, has introduced young scholars to her
extensive networks and created valuable opportunities for them
to present and publish their work. She has also acted as an
important link between the academic and policy communities,
not only providing academics with access to policymakers, but
ensuring that policymakers received the best advice from the
right experts. In doing so, she has promoted significant reforms
and, just as importantly, has helped to avert some foreseeably
adverse outcomes. In addition, her contributions extend to her
own research, which has broken new ground both substantively
and methodologically. Indeed, the fact that family law is such a
thriving field of socio-legal research and teaching is due in no
small part to Mavis’s example and her encouragement and
training of others to engage in this form of scholarship, as well
as her fostering of scholarship through book and journal editing.
Even after her ‘retirement’, Mavis continues to be active in
research, editing, mentoring, networking, policy engagement
and strategising. It is hard to imagine the socio-legal community
without her.
The prize, which is sponsored by a private benefactor, will
be presented to Mavis at the 2012 SLSA annual conference at
Leicester De Montfort University.
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SLSA chair Rosemary Hunter summarises the SLSA’s
recent submission to HEFCE’s consultation on Draft
Panel Criteria and Working Methods for the REF.
Preparation of the SLSA response was informed by consultation
with other learned societies in law, and by the seminar
organised by the SLSA on ‘impact’ in the Research Excellence
Framework (REF), held on 16 September 2011. The seminar
provided a valuable opportunity for dialogue between the REF
law sub-panel and members of the academic community. We
are grateful to the British Academy for provision of the venue
for the seminar and to the excellent panel of speakers including
Gillian Douglas (REF law sub-panel chair), Hugh Collins, Costas
Douzinas and Stephen Bailey. The following is an overview of
the SLSA submission. The results of the consultation will be
announced by the Higher Education Funding Council for
England (HEFCE) in January.
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HEFCE’s proposal that a reduction in outputs would only be
allowed for women who had taken 14 o r more months’
maternity leave during the REF period attracted widespread
condemnation. The SLSA’s submission joined with many others
in rejecting the proposal and supporting the alternative
approach to allow a reduction in the number of outputs by one
for each discrete period of maternity leave. We are pleased to
note that HEFCE has already announced its intention to adopt
this alternative. The SLSA also submitted that equivalent
reductions should be allowed for each period of adoption leave
or additional paternity leave (beyond the two-week period of
statutory paternity leave) taken by any staff member during the
REF period.
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The SLSA argued that discipline sub-panels should have the
capacity to issue separate guidance, as in the Research
Assessment Exercise 2008.
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The SLSA expressed concern that Main Panel C’s proposed
application of the criteria of ‘originality’, ‘significance’ and ‘rigour’
was confusing and potentially contradictory, as it appeared to
emphasise the significance of the output, and to correspondingly
downplay the criteria of originality and rigour. We submitted that
this proposal was unhelpful. Rather, we argued that sub-panels
should be given discretion to apply the generic criteria in
accordance with the norms of the relevant discipline.
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As socio-legal research is often undertaken and publications
written collaboratively, we considered this to be an issue of
particular concern to SLSA members. We welcomed the
proposed procedures for dealing with co-authored outputs
submitted by different higher education institutions (HEIs), but
did not agree with the proposed restrictions on the submission
of co-authored outputs for different staff members (page 3 ä)
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Our annual conference next year is at Leicester De Montfort Law
School, 3–5 April 2012. Please see page 4 for the list of streams
and themes and the call for papers.
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Our annual free postgraduate conference is being hosted by
Queen’s University Belfast on 12 and 13 January 2012. Full
details are now available on the SLSA website. If you have any
queries, please contact organiser Sally Wheeler
es.wheeler@qub.ac.uk.
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This is a trio of one-day conferences to explore these three key
aspects of socio-legal studies. All three events will take place in
London. Full details are available on the SLSA website at:
w www.slsa.ac.uk/content/view/291/330.
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This one-day conference will be on 21 September 2012 at the
London School of Economics. Further details will be published
in due course. Conference organiser: Dave Cowan
ed.s.cowan@bristol.ac.uk.
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