Professor Annette Morris

Biography

Originally from Aberystwyth, Annette graduated from the University of East Anglia (UEA) in 1996 with a first class honours degree in Law with European Legal Systems and achieved a School of Law Prize for my academic achievement. During 1994-1995 she also studied at the University of Limburg in Maastricht, The Netherlands as an ERASMUS student. She was awarded my Masters by Research from UEA, which concerned damages for personal injury, in 1998.

Before joining Cardiff in 2003, she worked as a legal assistant in the claims department of the Norwich and Norfolk NHS Trust; was a pupil barrister at 4 Pump Court, Temple - a defendant-oriented common law and commercial chambers in London - and was policy research officer at the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers.

Honours and awards

• Outstanding Contribution Award, Cardiff University (2018)
• Nominated for Celebrating Excellence Award - Exceptional Enhancement of the Student Experience, Cardiff University (2018)
• Nominated for Enriching Student Life Award - Most Uplifting Member of Staff, Cardiff University Students' Union (2018)
• Nominated for Celebrating Excellence Award - Excellence in Support of Teaching and Research, Cardiff University (2017)
• Cardiff University Centre of Education Innovation Award on Enhancing Access to Learning and Teaching in Law (2017)
• Nominated for Enriching Student Life Award - Teaching, Cardiff University Students' Union (2015)
• Visiting Scholar, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia (invited) (2015)
• Cardiff University Research Leave Felowship (2015)
• Outstanding Contribution Award, Cardiff University (2014)
• Nominated for Law Lecturer of the Year Award, LawCareers.Net (2014)
• Nominated for Enriching Student Life Award (Best Personal Tutor), Cardiff University Students' Union (2014)
• Best Personal Tutor Award, Cardiff University Student Law Society (2014)
• Appointed as Fellow, European Centre for Tort and Insurance Law, Vienna, Austria (2013)
• Cardiff University Research Opportunity Placement Award (2013)
• Appointed as judging panels of Society of Legal Scholars' Annual Best Paper Prize and Best Poster Prize (2012-2017)
• Appointed as Executive Officer of Society of Legal Scholars (Subject Sections Secretary) (2012-2017)
• Nominated for Enriching Student Life Award, Cardiff University Students' Union (2011)
• Appointed as Academic Advisor to Personal Injury Committe, Civil Justice Council (2009-2011)
• Visiting Lecturer, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic (2007 and 2008)
• Appointed to Government-led Working Party on Claims Advertising, Department for Constitutional Affairs (2006)
• Junior Scholarship, Gray's Inn (1998)
• School of Law Student Prize, University of East Anglia (1996)

Professional memberships

• Society of Legal Scholars
• Socio-Legal Studies Association
• Fellow, European Centre for Tort and Insurance Law, Vienna, Austria

Speaking engagements

Date	Title	Event
June 2018	The McDonaldization of Civil Justice: A Personal Injury Perspective	Norwich Law School, UEA
May 2018	The McDonaldization of Civil Justice: A Personal Injury Perspective	Law and Society Association Annual Conference, Toronto, Canada
Oct 2017	Whiplash Reform	Next Steps for Civil Justice Reform, Westminster Legal Policy Forum, London
June 2017	Understanding the Commoditization of Law: A Personal Injury Perspective	Law and Society Association Annual Conference, Mexico City, Mexico
Mar 2016	The Personal Injury Claims Process in England and Wales	The Personal Injury Claims Process: Comparing Legal Cultures, British Institute of International and Comparative Law, London
Dec 2015	Tort and Economic Liberalisation	Private Law in the 21st Century, Brisbane, Australia
June 2015	Proportionality and Procedural Rationing: A Critique of Civil Justice in the UK	Law and Society Association Annual Conference, Seattle, USA
Sept 2014	Deconstructing Public Policy Debates on Tort	School of Law, Reading University
May 2014	Deconstructing Public Policy Debates on Tort	Compensation Culture or Accident Culture, University of Limerick, Ireland
July 2013	Tort and Social Justice in the UK	Law on the Edge, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
June 2013	The UK 'Compensation Culture': Trends and Tribulations	Law and Society Association Annual Conference, Boston, USA
Mar 2013	Pleural Plaques, Social Justice and Tort in the UK: Is Adversarial Legalism Taking Root?	Legal Mobilization: Europe in Comparative Perpective, European Consortium for Political Research Joint Sessions, Mainz, Germany
September 2012	Compensation Culture Revisited: The Road Traffic Accident Exception	Society of Legal Scholars Annual Conference, Bristol University
April 2012	Tort Law Culture in the United Kingdom: Image and Reality in Personal Injury Compensation (with Richard Lewis)	Cultures of Tort Law in Europe, European Centre for Tort and Insurance Law, Vienna, Austria
Oct 2011	The Politics of Tort and the Compensation Culture	Workshop on Tort and the Legislature (funded by British Academy), York Law School, York University
June 2011	The Politicisation of Tort and Adversarial Legalism: The Anglo-American Way?	Law and Society Association Annual Conference, San Francisco, USA
July 2010	Claims for Sale: Injured Ethics?	International Legal Ethics Conference IV, Stanford University, California, USA
April 2009	Asbestos Wars and the Battle Over Pleural Plaques	Socio-Legal Studies Association Annual Conference, Leicester
November 2008	The Liability of Public Bodies and the Law Commission's Paper on Administrative Redress	Informal Seminar, Cardiff Law School
September 2007	The Proposed Streamlined Procedure for Lower-value Personal Injury Claims	Association of Personal Injury Lawyers Costs and Funding Conference , London
July 2007	Small Claims, Big Problem? The Personal Injury Perspective	W G Hart Workshop on access to justice , Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, London
October 2006	The Compensation Culture and Empirical Research	Panel on Compensation Culture, Society of Legal Scholars Annual Conference, Keele
May 2006	Coping with the Costs War: The Judiciary and the Conditional Fee Regime	Changes of Judicial Culture and Decision Making in Different Branches of Law, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic
January 2006	Haltom and McCann's 'Distorting the Law'	Cardiff Law School Research Away Day, Cardiff
December 2005	Spiralling or Stabilising? The Compensation Culture and our Propensity to Claim Damages for Personal Injury	Does the Litigation System in England and Wales Deliver Access to Justice and Value for Money?, Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, Oxford
October 2005	The Compensation Culture Debate: Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics	Society of Legal Scholars Annual Conference, Glasgow
May 2005	No-win, No-fee, No Stopping Us?	Cardiff Law School Staff Seminar , Cardiff
Apr 2005	Making a Bad System Worse? The Relationship between CFAs and the Tort System	Socio-Legal Studies Association Annual Conference, Liverpool

Committees and reviewing

• Editorial Board, Journal of Law and Society
• Editorial Board, Journal of Personal Injury Law
• Advisory Board (formerly Assistant Editor and Acting Editor), Professional Negligence
• Member, ESRC DTP Peer Review College and +3 Assurance Checker

Publications

• Date
• Type
• Selected

Teaching

Over the years, Annette taught numerous modules on the undergraduate and the postgraduate courses.

Undergraduate (LLB)

• Tort - Module leader, lectuter and tutor
• Legal Rights and Civil Justice - Lecturer and tutor
• Lawyers: Practice and Ethics - Lecturer and tutor
• Legal Foundations - Acting module leader, lecturer and tutor

Postgraduate

• Commercial Legal Practice, LLM - Module leader, lecturer and tutor
• Empirical Studies in Law, MSc SSRM - guest tutor

Summary

Annette was an internationally respected and widely referenced interdisciplinary and empirical researcher on personal injury compensation - a highly policitised and contentious area of tort law.

She had a distinctive voice among tort scholars internationally because, whilst most tort scholars focus on legal doctrine, Annette focused on the tort system. Her basic premise is that an understanding of the tort system is fundamental to an understanding of the role and importance of tort law in society. As the system affects both levels of claiming and the extent to which claims outcomes reflect tortious legal principles, the system dictates what the law is able to achieve.In other words, questions about who should receive compensation, in what circumstances, and in what measures are answered not only within the substantive law itself but through the system that gives effect to it.

Before she retired from ill health, there were three main tranches of her research.

1. Compensation Culture

Annette's international reputation emerged from her work on compensation culture. Concerns surrounding litigiousness were an international phenomenon and she was widely recognised as the leading UK authority on the issue. Drawing on empirical data and adopting a social constructionist critique, her research challenged misconceptions surrounding trends in claiming and explained how those misconceptions arose.

2. Socio-Legal Analysis of Personal Injury Claims in England and Wales

She completed (with Richard Lewis) the England and Wales part of the first ever European comparative empirical investigation into the personal injury claims system. This was a ground-breaking project funded by the Institute of European Tort Law, Vienna led by Ken Oliphant.  The research drew on 29 elite interviews of claimant and defendant lawyers, barristers and one insurer and explained how the claims process is affected by a wide range of non-legal factors, including the economics of legal practice.

3. Deconstructing Policy on the Tort System

There is a large distinction between what tort law offers in principle and what it delivers in practice, as tortious legal principles are mediated through complex institutional arrangements involving liability insurance, legal services and the civil justice system. In combination, these arrangements dictate the extent to which the injured are able and willing to seek tort compensation and what they, both individually and collectively, are able to achieve through the pursuit of tort actions. However, these instititional arrangements are contingent upon the political, socio-economic and commercial environment. Annette explained why these arrangements changed over the years and, by doing so, she explored how these political, socio-economic and commercial developmenrs were affecting the use, nature and the role of tort law as a means of: distributing the cost of injury; managing complex social relations and regulating behaviour.

Before she had a stroke, Annette was drawing together the empirical and theoretical strands of her work to link current trends on how we 'do' tort law with broader social phenomena, including the commoditisation of legal processes and the McDonaldization of civil justice.

Funding

• Cardiff University Research Leave Fellowship - £3,000 (2015-2016)
• ERSC Wales DTP 1+3 Studentship on Civil Justice - £38,000 including £8,000 contribution from Irwin Mitchell solicitors, London (2014-2018)
• A Socio-Legal Analysis of Personal Injury Claims in England and Wales (with Lewis), Institute of European of European Tort Law, Vienna - £12,000 (2013-2014)
• Cardiff University Research Opportunity Placement - £1,360 (2013)
• Understanding Perceptions of Claiming: A Pilot Study (with Moorhead, Cahill-O'Callaghan and Van der Schalk), Civil Justice Council - £8,600 (2010)

Supervision

Past projects

• Co-Supervisor (50%) for Oliver Wannell - The Role of Technology in the Resolution of Personal Injury Claims (awarded 2021) (awarded an ESRC Wales DTP 1+3 Studentship with a contribution from Irwin Mitchell Solicitors LLP)
• Co-Supervisor (50%) for Rachel Cahill O-Callaghan - The Influence of Personal Values on Legal Judgments (awarded 2016)
• Second Supervisor for Taiwo Oriola - Risks, Responsibility and Rights in Transgenic Plant Technology Governance: A Transnational Perspective (awarded 2016)