Personal Statement
Helen Stalford has been a member of the academic staff at Liverpool since April 2000 and was Head of the Law Department between 2021 and 2024.
Helen is proud of her long association with the University and city of Liverpool; she graduated from the University of Liverpool with an LLB Honours in English and French Laws with French in 1996. She then completed her PhD at the University of Leeds whilst working as a research assistant on a European Commission-funded project relating to children, migration and EU law (1997-2000). She moved back to Liverpool in the year 2000 to take up a lectureship in the Law School where she has remained ever since.
Helen is a leading expert on children's rights, having researched and published extensively in this area. She has led projects on behalf of the EU Fundamental Rights Agency and the Council of Europe to develop children's rights indicators, and has acted as expert consultant to the Council of Europe, the European Commission and UNICEF on issues relating to child friendly justice, child protection and the children's rights implications of EU enlargement. In 2016, she was appointed as Special Adviser to the House of Lords EU Home Affairs sub-committee for their inquiry into the UK and EU's response to the plight of unaccompanied children in the current refugee crisis. She was nominated for the University of Liverpool award for outstanding research impact for this work in 2016.
From 2015-2017 she co-convened the AHRC-funded Children's Rights Judgments Project (with Prof Kathryn Hollingsworth, Newcastle University). This involved a collaboration between nearly 60 academics and legal practitioners from across the world which sought to illustrate how to bring children's rights theory, methods, law and principles to bear on different judgments from different courts, jurisdictions and legal contexts (https://www.bloomsburyprofessional.com/uk/rewriting-childrens-rights-judgments-9781782259251/). This work was conducted in parallel with a European Commission-funded project, aimed at developing online training for lawyers on how to bring children's rights to bear on their case work involving children (http://www.project-tale.org/online-training).

During Covid, Helen was awarded funding from the ESRC to lead an 18 month empirical project, in collaboration with Elaine Chase (UCL), Ingi Iusmen and Jana Kreppner (University of Southampton), on the impact and legacies of Covid-19 for young unaccompanied asylum seekers' legal and welfare rights and experiences. She is currently working on a project with Social Workers Without Borders, Bail for Immigration Detainees, Melanie Griffiths (University of Birmingham) and Nazia Yaqub (University of Leeds) exploring the impacts of parental deportation on the welfare of children.

Helen is a founding member of the European Children's Rights Unit (ECRU). She established and continues to run the University of Liverpool's Young Person's Advisory Group, and co-ordinates research collaborations, methods and ethics exchange as Faculty theme lead for Children and Childhood. She is currently Principal Convenor (with Prof Lydia Hayes) of the Centre for People's Justice, a 5.8million investment by the AHRC and over 45 multi-sectoral partners. The Centre is the largest investment of the AHRC in Law and its core mission is to improve law and lives through community-led research across the UK.

Research Overview
Principal Convenor of the £5.8 million Centre for People’s Justice, a ground-breaking new Research Centre that aims to change law and lives through community-led research. It is the largest ever investment in the field of law by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The mission of the Centre for People’s Justice is to bring law and social justice research closer to people’s hopes, interests and needs for stronger, fairer and more inclusive societies. It enables community-led research that explores how law and legal systems can better support outcomes like access to good jobs for all, support for children and families, building communities where everyone feels safe, and confronting discrimination. The Centre's research and training work aims to:
➢ Connect the public more closely to the ways that law is made.
➢ Improve how law and rights are put into practice in everyday life.
➢ Expand public understandings of law and rights, past, present and future.

The Centre is a built on an alliance of over 45 organisations from arts and cultural, civic and NGO, corporate and philanthropic, legal and administrative, and academic sectors. It brings together researchers from seven UK universities (University of Ulster, Wrexham University, University of Swansea, Glasgow University, Sheffield University and the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, London) who have world-leading expertise in social-justice related research and methods.

Winner (with Prof Kathryn Hollingsworth, Newcastle University) for the SLSA best article prize, 2021, for their article 'This Case is About You and Your Future: Towards Judgments for Children' Modern Law Review, Volume 83(5) September 2020, 1030-1058.