About Us

Our mission is to promote and support women in legal philosophy and legal theory, broadly defined, by providing a means by which women involved in legal philosophy using methods broadly construed as analytic can meet, virtually and in person, to work out new arguments and exchange ideas. To this end, our aim is to provide a work-in-progress online session every six months, a biennial in-person conference hosted in venues alternating between North America and the United Kingdom, and a mentoring network for students and junior faculty that will address the full range of women's career interests and concerns in the field.

Executive Committee

Amalia Amaya

University of Edinburgh

Amalia Amaya is British Academy Global Professor at the School of law of the University of Edinburgh and Research Professor at the Institute for Philosophical Research of the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

She has a B. A. in Law from the University of Alicante and a B.A. in Linguistics from the University of Barcelone and holds an LLM and a PhD from the European University Institute and an LLM and a SJD from Harvard Law School.

Her current research explores the relations between virtue, law, and political community, with a special focus on legal reasoning and judicial ethics. She is also interested in examining the role of exemplarity in legal and political culture, the ideal of fraternity, and ambivalence in legal decision-making.

Laura Biron-Scott

St Augustine's College of Theology

Laura Biron-Scott studied Philosophy at Queens' College, Cambridge, and at Harvard on a Kennedy Scholarship. She completed a PhD in Philosophy at St John's College, Cambridge, before taking up a Junior Research Fellowship in Philosophy of Law at Queens' College, where she was also affiliated to the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law.

Laura has worked as a Greenwall Fellow in Bioethics and Health Policy at Johns Hopkins University, an assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Virginia, and a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Kent. Laura recently trained for ordained ministry in the Church of England and is currently a priest in Oxford Diocese and an honorary chaplain of Magdalen College, Oxford.

Her research focuses on the intersection between philosophy, law, and public policy, with a particular focus on the nature and justification of intellectual property. Laura's wider research interests include philosophy of religion, aesthetics, and environmental ethics.

Bebhinn Donnelly-Lazarov

University of Surrey

Bebhinn joined the Surrey School of Law in September 2017. She moved from Swansea University, where she was a Professor in the College of Law and Criminology. Bebhinn is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin (where she was an exhibitioner), The Inns of Court School of Law, and Birmingham University. She is a member of Middle Temple and the Bar of Northern Ireland.

Her research has straddled a number of substantive fields including criminal law, international law, and environmental law but the focus is always a philosophical one, where the aim is to elucidate law's underlying concepts and normative rationales. Her book on criminal attempts, published by Cambridge University Press in 2015, is structured around an Anscombian account of intentional action. Recent and ongoing work explores our understanding of the mind and considers its implications for criminal responsibility, mens rea, omissions, and for defences. Bebhinn has begun to write a book on law, knowledge and consciousness.

Claire Hogg

UCL

Claire Hogg is a research fellow in law and philosophy at UCL, working on the ERC-funded project Roots of Responsibility. She completed her PhD in Law at King’s College London, under a Dickson Poon Scholarship. Prior to this, she obtained a BA and a BPhil in Philosophy from the University of Oxford, and an MA in Medical Ethics and Law from King’s College London.

Her main areas of interest are criminal law and legal theory, medical law (most specifically mental health and capacity law), and moral philosophy. In particular, her research focuses on mental disorder as a factor relevant to culpability determinations within the criminal law, with a focus on doctrines of legal “insanity”.