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Pauline Roberts

Ms Pauline Roberts

Senior Lecturer in Law

School of Law and Politics

Email
RobertsPI@cardiff.ac.uk
Telephone
+44 29208 75108
Campuses
Law Building, Room 1.08, Museum Avenue, Cardiff, CF10 3AX

Overview

I am a Senior Lecturer at Cardiff, having joined the Law School as a lecturer in 1995. This followed a period as a Research Assistant in the Company & Commercial Law team at the Law Commission of England and Wales, where I worked on the Consultation Paper on Shareholder Remedies.  I moved into legal research after first qualifying as a solicitor at Linklaters & Paines, London.

I established the Discrimination & Law module on the LLB degree programme, reflecting my research interest in the legal regulation of discrimination in the workplace.  While maintaining my work on equality in employment, I have extended my research focus towards the impact of the equality legal framework in educational settings.  My current project investigates experiences within schools in Wales in relation to the Equality Act 2010, based on interviews with head teachers and other senior members of school leadership teams. The research draws upon the interviewees’ experience of equality issues in general, before focusing on their experience of drafting Strategic Equality Plans and responding to the needs of students who are disabled.

I am currently the Chair of the LLB Examining Board and a member of the School's Equality and Diversity Committee.

I continue to teach Discrimination & Law, together with Contract Law, and supervise dissertations on the LLB and LLM programmes.

Publication

2023

2021

2016

2013

2012

2010

2009

2007

2003

2002

2001

1999

1998

1997

Articles

Book sections

Books

Conferences

Research

The underlying theme of my recent research is disability discrimination, both in the workplace and in education. I am currently completing an analysis of employment tribunal decisions in which the tribunal was required to adjudicate in claims of both unfair dismissal and disability discrimination.   This work assesses how adjudicators apply the various standards of review in these types of cases, and whether there is evidence of confusion and/or inconsistency in the adjudication of these claims.

During a recent period of university study leave I commenced a project to identify some of the current equality challenges faced by schools in Wales. This involved interviewing senior leaders in a range of schools.   The interviews were designed with a two-fold purpose: first, to identify potential general equality issues arising in schools today; secondly, to assess the challenges in relation to two specific aspects of the Equality Act 2010, namely disability and the public sector equality duty.

Teaching

At undergraduate level, I am module leader, lecturer and tutor on Discrimination & Law.

I also co-module lead and lecture on Contract Law, a first year undergraduate module.

I often supervise final year undergraduate dissertations, as well as dissertations on the LLM degree programme.

I have also taught Labour Law and Company Law.

Biography

After studying Law as an undergraduate at Cambridge, I qualified as a solicitor in 1992.  I completed my LLM studies at Edinburgh in 1994 and then joined the Law Commission of England and Wales as a Research Assistant, before moving to Cardiff in 1995.

Visiting lecturerships:

  • University of Innsbruck (2009)
  • University of Nantes (2007)
  • Charles University, Prague (2003)
  • Université de Picardie, Jules Verne, Amiens (2003)
  • Konstanz University (2003)

Professional memberships

  • Society of Legal Scholars
  • Employment Lawyers Association
  • Industrial Law Society
  • Law and Religion Scholars Network

Academic positions

2015 - present: Senior Lecturer, Cardiff University

1995-2015: Lecturer, Cardiff University

Committees and reviewing

  • Trustee, plugin (2015-)
  • Member of the Employment Lawyers Association Working Party on the Government consultation: 'Equality Act 2010: consultation on employer liability for harassment of employees by third parties' (2012)
  • Assistant Editor, Legal Studies (1999-2001; editors Celia Wells and Derek Morgan)
  • Journal reviewer, Legal Studies and the Journal of Law and Society.

Supervisions

I am interested in supervising PhD students in the areas of:

  • Equality law and education
  • The legal response to disability discrimination in the workplace