Staff profile

William's areas of research expertise are private law and legal philosophy. He arrived at Durham Law School in summer 2012, having previously been a Professor at the Law School, University of Manchester. Before that he had held chairs at Cardiff University, Keele University and the University of Hull Law School (where he was almost the inaugural HK Bevan Professor of Law). He holds an undergraduate degree in law and postgraduate degrees in jurisprudence and in political philosophy. He teaches mainly private law subjects and legal philosophy and has supervised a number of doctoral students in these fields. These are also the principal fields in which he publishes, his first two monographs being Understanding and Explaining Adjudication (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1999) and Philosophy of Private Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press 2007), neither of which is as expensive as you might think. His latest book, Law's Judgement, was published in July 2017 by Hart Publishing and is in part based upon work funded by the Leverhulme Trust (MRF 2012-142). It is also surprisingly good value (for a taster, click here: https://media.bloomsburyprofessional.com/rep/files/9781509913282sample.pdf).

William's recent work explores competing models of regulation and he has written on the differences between legal regulation and technological management, the implications of regulation by AI for human agency and the prospects for law in a technologically mediated future. Some of these themes were interogated at a gathering in Tallinn University in October 2024 (https://www.tlu.ee/en/yti/news/conference-death-law-machines-technology-and-algorithms-deciding-address-impact-technology) and explored in a Major Research Project on Justice and Artificial Intelligence at Durham's Institute of Advanced Studies in Epiphany term 2023 (https://www.durham.ac.uk/research/institutes-and-centres/advanced-study/projects/future-projects/justice-and-artificial-intelligence-/). William was a principal investigator on the project alongside Dr Noura Al-Moubayed from Durham's Department of Computer Science.    

William has held visiting posts at a number of Universities, including the TC Beirne School of Law, University of Queensland, Brisbane, the College of Law, Australian National University, Canberra, and the Faculty of Law, McGill University, Montreal. In January 2014 William was the Rt. Hon. John Turner Fellow in Public Law at the Law School, University of Western Ontario. For Michaelmas term 2014-15, he was a Sir Neil MacCormick Visiting Fellow at Edinburgh Law School, University of Edinburgh. He was a visiting fellow at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London, from April until June 2017, where he pursued work on Access to Justice (for the first published installment of that project, click here: https://ojs.uwindsor.ca/ojs/leddy/index.php/WYAJ/issue/view/465) and a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Agency, Values and Ethics at Macquarie University in summer 2018. He was Paul KC Chung Visiting Professor of Legal Philosophy at Hong Kong University Faculty of Law in February 2024 and will be Lee Kong Chian Visiting Professor, Yong Pung How School of Law, Singapore Management University in Jan-Feb 2025.  

• adjudication and legal reasoning
• legal philosophy
• philosophy of private law
• the normative standing of access to justice

Chapter in book

• Lucy, W. (in press). Agency in the Face of AI. In R. Brownsword, & L. Di Matteo (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of the Governance of Technology: Discontent, Disconnect and Disruption. Cambridge University Press
• Lucy, W. (2014). The Rule of Law and Private Law. In L. M. Austin, & D. Klimchuk (Eds.), Private law and the rule of law (41-66). Oxford University Press
• Lucy, W., & Williams, A. (2013). Public and Private: Neither Deep Nor Meaningful?. In K. Barker, & D. (. Jensen (Eds.), Private law : key encounters with public law (45-88). Cambridge University Press
• Lucy, W. (2013). Private and Public: Some Banalities About a Platitude. In C. Mac Amhlaigh, C. Michelon, & N. Walker (Eds.), After public law (56-82). Oxford University Press
• Lucy, W. (2009). What's Private about Private Law?. In A. Robertson, & H. Tang (Eds.), Goals of private law (47-75). Hart Publishing
• Lucy, W. (2008). Judges, distinguished. In P. Cane, & J. Conaghan (Eds.), Oxford Companion to Law (649-651). OUP

Journal Article

• Lucy, W. (online). Legal Regulation, Technological Management and the Future of Human Agency. Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, https://doi.org/10.1093/ojls/gqae035
• Lucy, W. (2024). Algorithms and adjudication. Jurisprudence, 15(3), 251-281. https://doi.org/10.1080/20403313.2023.2243712
• Lucy, W. (2022). The Death of Law, Another Obituary. Cambridge Law Journal, 81(1), 109-138. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0008197321001021
• Lucy, W. (2022). Law School 2061Ψ. Modern Law Review, 85(2), 539-553. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2230.12689
• Lucy, W. (2020). Access to Justice and the Rule of Law. Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 40(2), 377-402. https://doi.org/10.1093/ojls/gqaa012
• Lucy, W. (2019). Is opacity a value?. Ordines (Catanzaro), V(1), 1-26
• Lucy, W. (2019). Law's Judgement: a Summary. Problema anuario de filosofía y teoría del derecho (en línea), 13, 3-8
• Lucy, W. (2019). Law's judgement : some thoughts. Problema anuario de filosofía y teoría del derecho (en línea), 13, 55-63
• Lucy, W. (2016). The Normative Standing of Access to Justice: An Argument from NonDomination. Windsor yearbook of access to justice, 33(2), 231-261. https://doi.org/10.22329/wyaj.v33i2.4930
• Lucy, W. (2011). Equality Under and Before the Law. University of Toronto Law Journal, 61(3), 411-465. https://doi.org/10.1353/tlj.2011.0019
• Lucy, W. (2009). Abstraction and the Rule of Law. Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 29(3), 481-509. https://doi.org/10.1093/ojls/gqp010
• Lucy, W. (2009). Persons in Law. Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 29(4), 787-804
• Lucy, W. (2009). Abstraction and Equality. Current Legal Problems, 62(1), 22-70. https://doi.org/10.1093/clp/62.1.22
• Lucy, W. (2007). Method and Fit: Two Problems for Contemporary Philosophies of Tort Law. McGill law journal, 52(4), 605-656

Monograph

• Lucy, W. (2017). Law's Judgement. Hart Publishing. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781509913312