Professor Sarah Blandy

Position: Professor of Law
Email Address: S.Blandy@sheffield.ac.uk
Telephone: +44 (0)114 222 6776
Room No: EF11
Feedback and Consultation Availability: You can book an appointment online to see me

Academic Profile

After graduating in Law from the University of Warwick, I qualified and practised as a solicitor for ten years. I then worked for the Housing Department at Sheffield City Council, before starting my academic career at Sheffield Hallam University. From 2005 I held various academic posts at the School of Law, University of Leeds, and I joined Sheffield as a professor in 2012.

I am co-Director of the FreeLaw legal advice clinic, and enjoy working with the student volunteers and making good use of my previous experience as a legal practitioner.

My research concerns ‘property law in the real world’, a perspective I try to integrate into my teaching.

Qualifications

LLB, Solicitor of the Supreme Court

Teaching and Learning

I enjoy teaching at all levels, and aim to convey my enthusiasm for the subjects I teach and to encourage students in creative thinking and critical analysis. I bring a socio-legal focus to my teaching based on my research, so that the material covered is related to the real world.

The modules I teach are:

Undergraduate
Property Law (Land Law, Equity and Trusts) (LAW137)
Special Project: Pro Bono (LAW3043)

Research

My research is interdisciplinary and empirical, focusing on socio-legal aspects of property law, including:

tenure and rights
collective and individual property rights
multi-owned property
regulation of conduct, dispute resolution, and access to justice, amongst residential occupiers
the spatial boundaries of law, especially in relation to fortified homes and gated communities

I am currently working on a book on collective property for Palgrave Macmillan's Socio-Legal Series;

Areas of Research Supervision

I would be delighted to hear from students wishing to carry out research in those aspects of Property Law in which I have expertise.
I am currently supervising:

Richard Goulding, funded by ESRC / White Rose, whose research investigates the financial, legal and social geographies of low income urban housing in Britain.
Edward Mitchell, funded by ESRC, whose research investigates the role law plays in retail-led urban regeneration schemes, through an actor network approach.
Molly Matthewman, whose research investigates the role of law in Graduate Housing in London, and the relationship between tenure, identity and 'home'.

Recent Invited Papers and Keynote Lectures

'Sharing in the high-rise: law and place', keynote talk at the Symposium on Comparative Social Sustainability: Condominium Law, Living and Landscapes, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (Europe), Barcelona, 21-22 November 2016
'Ownership and belonging in urban green space' (with Simone Abram, Anthropology, Durham), Symposium on Legal Strategies for the Development and Protection of Communal Property, School of Law, University of Sheffield, 23-24 May 2016.
'Reflections on Ethnography and Expertise', Research Methodologies Seminar, Socio-Legal Cluster, Sheffield Hallam University, 13 January 2016.
'Precarity and the Sharing Continuum: Property rights, the home, and housing protests', The Precarious Home Workshop, International Institute for Sociology of Law, Onati, Spain, 25-26 June 2015
'Communal Property Rights in the UK: sharing and decision-making in residential property', International seminar Diversifying Ownership: Communal Property in the UK and China, Queens University Belfast, 14-15 May 2015.

Key Projects/Grants

Title/Description:	Advisory Board member for research project on Materialising Kinship: Cycles of life at the Norwegian cabin
Awarding Body:	Norwegian Research Council
People Involved:	Marianne Lien, University of Oslo and Simone Abram, University of Durham
Dates:	2016-2020
Amount:	£667,000

Title/Description:	Invited seminar on 'Enduring Property Relations'
Awarding Body:	Modern Law Review
People Involved:	Professor Susan Bright (University of Oxford) and Professor Sarah Nield (University of Southampton)
Date:	May2016
Amount:	£5000

Title/Description:	Homelessness Prevention for Women and Children Who Have Experienced Domestic and Family Violence: Innovations in Policy and Practice
Awarding Body:	Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute
People Involved:	Dr. Angela Spinney, Swinburne University, Australia
Dates:	2010-2012
Amount:	AUS $101,570

Key Publications

Books

Atkinson R & Blandy S (2016) Domestic Fortress Fear and the New Home Front. Manchester: Manchester University Press. View this article in WRRO

Journal articles

Blandy S, Bright S & Nield S (2018) The Dynamics of Enduring Property Relationships in Land. The Modern Law Review, 81(1), 85-113. View this article in WRRO
Blandy S (2014) Socio-legal approaches to property law research. Property Law Review, 3(3), 166-175. View this article in WRRO
Blandy S & Wang F (2013) Curbing the power of developers? Law and power in Chinese and English gated urban enclaves. Geoforum, 47, 199-208.
Blandy S & Sibley D (2010) Law, boundaries and the production of space. Social and Legal Studies, 19(3), 275-284.
Atkinson R & Blandy S (2009) A picture of the floating world: Grounding the secessionary affluence of the residential cruise liner. Antipode, 41(1), 92-110.
Atkinson R & Blandy S (2007) Panic rooms: The rise of defensive homeownership. Housing Studies, 22(4), 443-458.

Chapters

Blandy S (2015) Socio-Legal Approaches to Property Law Research, Researching Property Law View this article in WRRO
Blandy S (2013) Collective Property: Owning and Sharing Residential Space, Modern Studies in Property Law (pp. 152-172).
Blandy S (2011) Gating as governance: the boundaries spectrum In Crawford A (Ed.), Social and Situational Crime Prevention: International and Comparative Criminal Justice and Urban Governance (pp. 519-544). CUP

Edited books

(Ed.) (2015) Researching Property Law. Palgrave Macmillan.
(Ed.) (2010) Multi-owned Housing: Law, Power and Practice. Routledge.