PLP welcomes our newest patron, Professor Iyiola Solanke

All of us at the Public Law Project are delighted to welcome Professor Iyiola Solanke as our newest patron.

Professor Solanke is a socio-legal scholar, with an expertise in EU and equality law. She is Chair of EU Law and Social Justice in the School of Law at the University of Leeds where she researches and teaches EU law, discrimination law, race and law, and Alternative Dispute Resolution.

Professor Solanke’s work is historical, empirical and socio-legal and her research interests include intersectional discrimination, critical race theory, and judicial diversity.

After completing her PhD at the London School of Economics, Iyiola joined the School of Law at the University of Leeds in 2010 and founded the Temple Women’s Forum North in 2013 to extend the outreach work of Inner and Middle Temples to legal professionals in the North and North East. In 2017 Iyiola was elected as an Academic Bencher of Inner Temple.

Iyiola is a Visiting Professor at Wake Forest University Law School and has been a Visiting Professor at Science Po, Grenoble in France. She has held Fellowships at the University of Michigan Law School (Ann Arbor, USA), the University of Sydney Law School (Sydney, Australia), McGill University Law School (Montreal, Canada) and at New Hall, Cambridge University. In 2018 Iyiola was a Fernand Braudel Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. In 2018 she was a Visiting Professor at Harvard School of Public Health, working with STRIPED on weight stigma.

Iyiola’s publications include Making Anti-Racial Discrimination Law and Discrimination as Stigma – A Theory of Anti-Discrimination Law, and she is an editor of Eutopialaw run by Matrix Chambers.

Previous research projects have focused on the impact of separate opinions on judicial authority, the Advocate General in the CJEU, social action and legal reform, cause lawyering, and black and migrant women in European welfare states.

Iyiola organises an international forum which investigates black experiences of policing in the EU, and the Black Female Professors Forum which promotes black women in academia. Iyiola also sits on the General Council of the International Society for Public Law.