About
Jane Krishnadas is Senior Lecturer in Law at Keele University’s School of Law, where she also serves as Director of the Community Legal Outreach Collaboration, Keele (CLOCK) and Director of Legal Outreach. She combines her background as a practising solicitor with an academic career focused on feminist socio-legal theory and community-based rights strategies.
Education
- BA Law & English, Keele University (1992)
- Solicitors Law Finals, Guildford (1993)
- PhD in Law, Keele University (2004)
Research Interests
Dr Krishnadas’s scholarship centres on feminist socio-legal rights theory and practice across the Global North and South. She employs cultural, materialist and spatial analyses to explore how intersecting identities of gender, caste, class and religion shape political representation, housing, religious laws, land rights, employment and domestic violence. Her work investigates sites ranging from the family and community to courts and international institutions such as the World Bank.
A second strand of her research focuses on community legal outreach and the development of innovative models—such as the ‘Community Legal Companion’—to address the impact of legal-aid cuts on marginalised populations. This research informs both policy and pedagogy, integrating community internships and participatory action methods into postgraduate curricula.
Publications Overview
Her recent publications chart a trajectory from critical feminist legal theory to empirical studies of community legal interventions. Collectively, they examine how legal strategies can become transformative in post-crisis and everyday contexts, analyse domestic violence during the COVID-19 lockdowns, and evaluate the CLOCK programme’s role in widening access to justice in England and Wales.
Grants & Projects
- Lead applicant, UKIERI UK–India Thematic Partnership – pioneering an international outreach methodology in social and legal research.
- Developer, Joint LLM in Access to Justice (Keele–Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai).
Teaching & Supervision
At undergraduate level she leads modules in Family Law, Law in Action and International Human Rights, and co-teaches Public Law. At postgraduate level she convenes Gender, Sexuality & Law; Human Rights and the Global Market; and the innovative elective Community Outreach & Socio-legal Advocacy. She currently supervises four international PhD students working on socio-legal critiques of human rights.
Labs & Outreach Teams
Dr Krishnadas directs CLOCK, a multi-stakeholder collaboration involving the North Staffordshire Law Society, Staffordshire Police, local councils and numerous third-sector partners. The initiative delivers community legal education, support and research while generating data for scholarly analysis and policy reform.
