Professor Nicola Lacey was Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, and Professor of Criminal Law and Legal Theory at the University of Oxford from 2010 until September 2013. She has held a number of visiting appointments, most recently at Harvard Law School and at New York University Law School. 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 in 2018 she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of Edinburgh. Nicola has been working in recent years with philosopher Hanna Pickard (Oxford Centre for Neuroethics and Princeton University) 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.
Nicola’s books include:
In Search of Criminal Responsibility: Ideas, Interests and Institutions (Oxford University Press, March 2016); Women, Crime and Character: From Moll Flanders to Tess of the d’Urbervilles (Oxford University Press 2008) (The Clarendon Law Lectures); The Prisoners’ Dilemma: Political Economy and Punishment in Contemporary Democracies (Cambridge University Press 2008) (The Hamlyn Lectures); and A Life of HLA Hart: The Nightmare and the Noble Dream (OUP 2004). (Winner of the RSA’s Swiney Prize 2004 and shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize for Biography and for the British Academy Book Prize.); Unspeakable Subjects: Feminist Essays in Legal and Social Theory (Hart Publishing 1998).