Gillian Douglas

Research interests
Professor Douglas is a researcher in family law, focusing on the relationship between law and social change across the family life-course. Her work has ranged from examining access to treatment for assisted reproduction through to public attitudes to inheritance law and the courts' approach to challenges to wills. She has conducted a number of empirical studies which have focused on the impact of relationship breakdown on family members, including on the relationship between grandparents and their grandchildren and on how children’s views can be taken into account when courts are dealing with parental disputes. She is currently a co-investigator on a study of financial arrangements on divorce, led by Professor Emma Hitchings at the University of Bristol and funded by the Nuffield Foundation.

Gillian Douglas has an LLB from Manchester University and gained an LLM at the London School of Economics. In 2011 she was awarded the degree of LLD (Doctor of Laws) by Cardiff University. She has taught at the University of Bristol, the National University of Singapore, Cardiff University and King's College London, where she was Executive Dean of The Dickson Poon School of Law. She is a past Secretary-General of the International Society of Family Law. She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2017 and an Honorary Bencher of Gray's Inn in 2018. She is also a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, the Learned Society of Wales and the Academy of Social Sciences.