School of Law

Professor Sarah Blandy

Position: Professor of Law
Email Address: S.Blandy@sheffield.ac.uk
Telephone: +44 (0)114 222 6776
Room No: EF01
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. I am also an executive committee member of the Socio-Legal Studies Association.

Qualifications

PhD, LLM, BA, FHEA

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, which means 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 publications about:

• Collective Property for Palgrave Macmillan's Socio-Legal Series;
• Enduring Property Relations;
• Urban green space and the idea of the commons.

Member of the Centre for the Study of Law in Society (Co-director) and of the Centre for Criminological Research Clusters.

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 Beijing and 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

Professional Activities and Recognition

• Member of the Executive committee, Socio-Legal Studies Association

Key Publications