Professor Duncan Sheehan Elected President of the Society of Legal Scholars

Professor Duncan Sheehan from the School of Law becomes President of the Society of Legal Scholars (SLS) for 2024-2025, with the annual conference at the University of Leeds in September 2025.

The School of Law’s Professor Duncan Sheehan has been elected as President of the Society of Legal Scholars (SLS) for the 2024-2025 academic year. His appointment was confirmed at the Society’s Annual General Meeting, marking a significant achievement in his longstanding association with the SLS.

Professor Sheehan, who has been an active member of the Society for over two decades and served it in many different capacities, was elected vice-president elect in 2022, before assuming the vice-president role for the 2023-2024 academic year. He officially took up the presidency on 1 October, 2024.

In a statement released by SLS following his appointment, Professor Sheehan expressed his gratitude:

“It is a great honour to serve as President of the Society of Legal Scholars of the UK and Ireland for 2024-2025.”

Founded in 1908, the Society of Legal Scholars is the oldest and largest learned society in the field of law in the UK, boasting approximately 3,000 members. It publishes Legal Studies, a leading academic law journal, and provides grants to support legal research and events.

The Society’s annual conference is a prominent event in the field, and in 2025, it will be hosted by the University of Leeds from 2-4 September. Professor Sheehan, who first attended the SLS conference in 1999, remarked:

Legal academia has changed much over the years. There has for example been a much greater institutional focus, in part, but not exclusively, driven by the REF, on interdisciplinarity, “challenge-led” research and impact on the “research user”. Yet none of us want – or have ever wanted – our research to disappear into the aether unnoticed. We all want to make a difference, or why are we bothering?

Increasingly, this is best – or only – done by engagement with other disciplines and with those research users at an early stage. We will pick up threads of discussion about these topics from both the Bristol and Oxford Brookes’ conferences in the plenary sessions at the Leeds conference. The conference has no particular theme, however, and I hope this will enable you to be imaginative in the ways you approach the diverse topics of our common subject of law.

“I hope to welcome as many of you as possible to Leeds in September 2025 but of course there are many other ways for you to get involved and I would encourage you to do so. It is, as others have said, your society. You make it and I look forward to working with you over the coming year.”

As he steps into his new role, Professor Sheehan looks forward to advancing the SLS’s mission and fostering greater engagement among its members throughout the year.