About
Professor Lydia Hayes is Principal Convenor (together with Prof Helen Stalford) of the £5.8 million Centre for People’s Justice, a groundbreaking new Research Centre to change law and lives through community-led research. It is the largest ever investment in the field of law by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The mission of the Centre for People’s Justice is to bring law and social justice research closer to people’s hopes, interests and needs for stronger, fairer and more inclusive societies. It enables community-led research that explores how law and legal systems can better support outcomes like access to good jobs for all, support for families and healthy lives, building communities where everyone feels safe and where everyone has a warm and comfortable home. The purpose is to:
➢ Connect the public more closely to the ways that law is made.
➢ Improve how law and rights are put into practice in everyday life.
➢ Expand public understandings of law and rights, past, present and future.
The Centre is a built on an alliance of 45 organisations from arts and cultural, civic and NGO, corporate and philanthropic, legal and administrative, and academic sectors. It brings together researchers from seven UK universities who have world-leading expertise in research about children and the importance of childhood; about employment, welfare and care; about corporate social responsibility; and about reducing violence and conflict across society.
Lydia's expertise is in employment law and welfare policy, as well as the regulation of public service provision, especially adult social care. Her research explores how law shapes the lives, livelihoods and life chances of people in low wage work. Lydia's research is co-produced with low wage workers, it blends rigorous analysis of statute, case law and regulatory text with data gathered through community writing methods, story-telling, animation, and narrative production.
Prior to joining Liverpool, Lydia was Professor and Head of Kent Law School and a Principal Investigator for Wellcome Trust. She has won awards for research excellence from the Socio-legal Studies Association (SLSA), Society of Legal Scholars (SLS), University of Bristol and Oxford University Press. Lydia has been a visiting scholar at RMIT, Melbourne and was awarded the first Journal of Law and Society Research Fellowship 2013-2016. She has previously worked at the International Labour Organisation in Geneva, at the Transport and General Workers Union, at University of Bristol and at Cardiff University. Lydia is a Vice-President of the Institute of Employment Rights and a member of the Berkeley Centre for Comparative Equality and Anti-Discrimination Law. Her research has been funded by Leverhulme/British Academy, Wellcome Trust, ILO, Welsh Government, Journal of Law and Society, Wales TUC, UNISON Scotland, UNISON North West, GMB, All Party Parliamentary Group on Social Care, Oxfam UK, European Commission.