School of Law

Professor Sarah Blandy

Position: Professor of Law
Email Address: S.Blandy@sheffield.ac.uk
Telephone: +44 (0)114 222 6776
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:

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;

Societies

I am a member of the Socio-Legal Studies Association

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:

• Molly Matthewman, whose research investigates the role of law in Graduate Housing in London, and the relationship between tenure, identity and 'home'.

My following supervisees successfully completed their PhDs in 2017-18:

• 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.

Recent Invited Papers and Keynote Lectures

• Understanding ‘space’ in law: gardens and gardening’, Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, University of Oxford, 19 February 2018
• ‘Copropriété in England and Wales’, Séminaire sur la copropriété (workshop on multi-owned property), PUCA, Paris, 26 January 2018
• ‘The Dynamics of Enduring Property Relations’ (with Susan Bright and Sarah Nield) keynote talk at the annual conference of Australasian Teachers of Property Law, Curtin University, Perth, Australia, 26-29 September 2017
• ‘Defended homes and enclaves: causes and consequences’, research seminar at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia, 20 September 2017
• '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.

Key Projects/Grants

Key Publications