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Lecturer, School of Law, University of Essex

Sahar Maranlou joined Essex Law School in September 2017. She is a socio- legal academic, specialising in access to justice, legal empowerment and public legal culture. Sahars research interests also focus on gender, Islamic Law and law and society in the Middle East (Iran in particular). She conducted the first study of women perceptions of law in Iran (her doctoral study). This was published as her first monograph Access to Justice in Iran: Women, Perceptions, and Reality (Cambridge University Press, 2015).She has taken a particular interest in qualitative legal research and especially ethnographic understanding of law in plural legal systems.

Before coming to Essex, she did her post doctoral fellowship at the University of Oxford (Sassakawa Peace Foundation Fellowship)working on legal empowerment in Iran and Turkey . Prior to that, she was a visiting lecture at University of Brunel, Warwick University. Her academic teaching started at the Mofid Law School, Iran, where she developed a new module about access to justice with focus on clinical legal education and consequently co-founded the first national university based clinic in Iran . She has worked with UN agencies such as UNDP, UNICEF on national empowerment projects in Iran .

Sahar is a regional (Middle East and North Africa) coordinator at the Global Access to Justice Project which is bringing together researchers from all over the world to seek out promising solutions to ensure equal access to justice for all.

Experience

  • –present
    Lecturer in socio-legal studies, Essex