Nicola Lacey

Nicola Lacey is School Professor of Law, Gender and Social Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. From 2010 until September 2013 she was Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, and Professor of Criminal Law and Legal Theory at the University of Oxford.   She has held a number of visiting appointments, most recently at Harvard Law School, at New York University Law School and at the Australian National University. She is an Honorary Fellow of New College Oxford and of University College Oxford. She is a Fellow of the British Academy, served as a member of the British Academy’s Policy Group on Prisons, which reported in 2014, and was from 2014-2019 the Academy’s nominee on the Board of the British Museum.

In 2017 she was awarded a CBE for services to Law, Justice and Gender Politics; and she holds Honorary Doctorates from the Universities of Edinburgh and Oslo. In 2011 she was awarded the Hans Sigrist Prize by the University of Bern, for scholarship on the rule of law in modern societies; and in 2022 she won the Law and Society Association’s International Prize.

In addition to her work in criminal justice, Nicola has been working in recent years with philosopher Hanna Pickard (Johns Hopkins) on the application of philosophical ideas of responsibility to criminal justice practices; and with political scientist David Soskice on the comparative political economy of crime, punishment and inequality.