Spotlight on our Research – Dr Laurène Soubise

Welcome to our Research Interview Series where we hear from academics and researchers across the School of Law making an impact in the field through their areas of expertise.

This time it is the turn of Dr Laurène Soubise, Associate Professor in Law. She specialises in comparative criminal justice and criminal law, with a particular focus on how criminal justice professionals interpret and apply the law in practice.

Could you briefly describe your latest research for a general audience?

For the past six years, I have been working with colleagues at the University of Liverpool and the University of Birmingham on a long‑standing issue in criminal law: the partial defence to murder of ‘loss of control’. Although this defence was reformed in 2009, concerns have continued about how it operates in practice, prompting us to ask whether it is working as intended.

The project examines how legal decision‑making actually happens, rather than how the law is supposed to work in theory. In that sense, it builds on my earlier research into how legal professionals, e.g. public prosecutors, exercise discretion. By looking beyond the law ‘in the books’, the research explores how decisions are made in practice, and what this means for fairness and consistency in the most serious criminal proceedings.

The project began without dedicated funding. More recently, it received support from the Economic and Social Research Council’s Impact Acceleration Account. This funding has been crucial in enabling a collaboration with the Centre for Women’s Justice, bringing together researchers, practitioners and campaigners, and supporting public‑facing outputs such as an animated video and a policy brief.

What are the most significant findings that have emerged?

One of the clearest findings from our research is that the defence of loss of control continues to operate in problematic ways. We examined over 100 appeal cases decided since the defence was introduced, including appeals against both conviction and sentence.

A central difficulty lies in the requirement that the defendant must have lost self‑control. The law’s focus on ‘loss of self-control’ reflects assumptions about sudden, explosive anger, patterns more commonly associated with male violence. This disadvantages women whose actions often follow prolonged domestic abuse rather than a single dramatic incident.

Courts often concentrate narrowly on the moment of the killing itself, without fully recognising the weeks, months or even years of coercive and controlling behaviour that can have preceded it. There is also limited awareness of how trauma affects memory. As a result, women who struggle to recall events clearly may be treated as unreliable, rather than as individuals responding to sustained abuse.

Overall, our findings suggest that the defence is not working as intended for some of the people it was meant to protect, pointing to the need for further reform and greater understanding of domestic abuse, particularly coercive control, and its effects.

Who is part of your research team, and what roles do they play?

The research is a collaborative project involving Professor Anna Carline and Dr Sarah Singh from the University of Liverpool, alongside Dr Matthew Gibson, a Visiting Scholar at Birmingham Law School. Together, the team brings expertise in criminal law, gender‑based violence and the criminalisation of women, combining doctrinal legal analysis with socio‑legal approaches. This breadth of expertise has been central to examining how the loss of control defence operates in practice.

How is your research making a difference beyond academia?

The research is contributing directly to national conversations about homicide law reform. The Law Commission is currently reviewing the law of homicide, and we submitted a response to its call for evidence in October 2025. We were pleased to see it cited in the Commission’s recent consultation paper on homicide offences, particularly in its discussion of how partial defences such as loss of control should operate fairly across different categories of homicide.

Alongside this policy engagement, we have worked closely with the Centre for Women’s Justice to ensure the research reaches practitioners, campaigners and the wider public. In November 2025, we organised an event bringing together researchers, lawyers and campaigners, which resulted in a series of illustrations capturing the realities of domestic homicide and highlighting gendered differences in how the law responds.

Buttercrumble illustration. The images show the gap between loss of control and self-defence, jury bias, victim-blaming, women's voices ignored, fear-driven responses misunderstood, coercive control, and more. Text explores 'Women and domestic homicide.'

We are also developing an animated video to explain the problems with the loss of control defence in an accessible way, alongside a policy brief aimed at judges, prosecutors and defence lawyers. As our research shows, legislative reform alone is not enough; meaningful change also requires a shift in understanding and culture across the criminal justice system.

What are the next steps for this line of research?

We are now considering how best to build on these findings. One potential next step is the development of training materials for those working within the criminal justice system, including judges, prosecutors and defence lawyers. These would be based on our research and focus on improving understanding of loss of control, domestic abuse and the effects of trauma on behaviour and memory.

More broadly, we are interested in future research that examines where problems arise across the life of a criminal case, from police investigation and prosecution decision‑making, through defence strategy, to how cases are understood and presented at trial. These ideas are still at an early stage, but they reflect our commitment to using research to support fairer decision‑making and more consistent outcomes in serious criminal cases.