Role: Senior Lecturer in Law, Bristol Law School; Head of the International Law and Human Rights Research Unit; Co-Editor in Chief, Journal of Human Rights and the Environment

  Contact: Anna.Grear@uwe.ac.uk

  Research Interests:
Human Rights | Legal Subjectivity | Human Rights and the Environment | Globalization | Rights Theory

Anna Grear is a legal theorist whose work focuses largely upon questions related to law's construction of the human being and of the human relationship with the world, broadly conceived. Her work calls on insights from a range of disciplines despite being firmly located within a combination of critical legal theory and jurisprudence. She has a particular interest in the themes of legal subjectivity and in vulnerability, locating these themes in relation to contemporary globalisation and to a central concern with the implications of the materiality of the living order – including the theme of lived embodiment.

Anna's monograph Redirecting Human Rights: Facing the Challenge of Corporate Legal Humanity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) has been welcomed as an important contribution to the development of a ‘radical revisionist critical human rights philosophy' and is credited with ‘founding a new ground of contestation' and marking a fresh start towards the understanding of the ontology of human rights.  Anna has published articles in leading academic journals (including Legal Studies, Res Publica, Law and Critique, The Human Rights Law Review) and is an invited contributor to some exciting publications projects, such as The New Oxford Companion to Law (OUP, 2008) and The Cambridge Handbook on Human Rights (CUP, 2012).  Anna has also recently published a co-edited collection (with J Jones, R Fenton and K Stevenson), Gender, Sexualities and Law(Glasshouse/Routledge, 2011), a collection bringing together an international range of academics and which provides a comprehensive interrogation of the range of contemporary issues – both topical and controversial – raised by the gendered character of law, legal discourse and institutions. She was also part of the UK Feminist Judgments Project (a project involving approximately 50 academics, with judges and practitioners, including Lady Hale of the UK Supreme Court) and has a judgment published in R Hunter, C McGlynn and E Rackley, Feminist Judgments: From Theory to Practice (Oxford: Hart, 2011).

Anna is currently working on a new monograph on legal subjectivity, on a series of articles/chapters and on three co-edited collections (Vulnerability (with Professor Martha Albertson Fineman) (forthcoming, 2012/3)); Human Rights and the Environment: Themes and Intersections 1: Paradigms in Transitional Relationship (with Professor Karen Morrow, forthcoming 2012/3); Research Handbook on Human Rights and the Environment (with Professor Louis Kotze, forthcoming 2014/5).  Anna will also be working  in 2012/3 on an edited collection for the Onati/Hart Publication Series, Human Rights and the Environment: In Search of a New Relationship (the proceedings of a seminar, to be held at the International Institute for the Sociology of Law, Onati, Spain in June 2012, which Anna is chairing).

Anna is co-editor, with Professor Martha Albertson Fineman and Dr Fiona De Londras) of a special edition of Social and Legal Studies on ‘Vulnerability and the Corporation' due out in 2012/3 and is series editor of Law, Justice and Ecology (a book series published by Glasshouse/Routledge).

Anna is the founder and co-editor in chief of the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, a journal praised for its timeliness, vision and intellectual quality.  She is also founder and director of the Global Network for the Study of Human Rights and the Environment (GNHRE) – an exciting international network of leading scholars in the field, activists, policy makers, lawyers and NGOs dedicated to the transformation of thinking concerning the relationship between human rights and the environment .  Anna is also founder of the Vulnerability Network (UK/EU) and is a Global Affiliate to the Vulnerability and Human Condition Collaboration, Emory University USA.

Anna has had visiting scholarships at St John's College, Oxford University, UK; The University of Keele (UK) AHRC-funded centre for Gender, Sexuality and Law; The Feminist Legal Theory Project's Vulnerability and Human Condition Initiative at Emory University, USA; and has spoken at a wide range of universities, conferences and events, internationally and within the UK, as an invited contributor – including at the recent ‘Being-In-Human' conference at Birkbeck College, University of London, 2011, organised by Professor Costas Douzinas (Birkbeck) and Professor Conor Gearty (LSE).

Anna's teaching experience is in a range of subjects related to her research interests and also reflects her long-standing interest in legal reasoning and in the teaching of reasoning skills to students. At Te Piringa Faculty of Law, Anna contributes to the teaching of the following subjects: Legal Method; Jurisprudence; Intersectionalities – Race, Gender, Sexuality and Law.

Anna came to academic life after working in a range of other roles, including theatre performance; political activism; community organisation; management.  Anna graduated from the University of Oxford in 1999 with a first class honours on the internationally respected two-year post-graduate BCL degree. She took up her first academic post in 2000, having decided not to pursue a career at the English bar – in essence because she became fascinated by legal theory and by the meta-questions surrounding law, its nature, its power and its social role.