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Prof Nigel Balmer
Honorary Professor
Faculty of Laws
UCL SLASH
- Joined UCL
- 1st Apr 2021
Research summary
Nigel's
research focusses on the application
of social science and modern quantitative methods to explore how the public
understand and interact with the law. His research is multidisciplinary and
collaborative, adapting methods from a broad range of disciplines, including
psychology, epidemiology, education, mathematics and statistics. His research
interests include exploring the role of law in everyday life, public
understanding of the law/legal rights, the experience of and response to legal
issues, the interaction between legal and health problems, design of legal
services, legal aid, access to justice, empirical research methodology and
statistics. He has also conducted research in sports science/sports psychology
and will happily tell you how far or high people can jump and provide a medal
table forecast for the next Olympics.
His most recent research projects include providing global guidance on the conduct of legal need surveys (to be published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), in collaboration with the Open Society Foundations) and modern psychometric measurement of legal capability and attitudes to justice (for The Legal Education Foundation).
Teaching summary
Much of Nigel's teaching at
aims to introduce students to empirical legal research and social science
research methods. He also has a specific interest in teaching related to the
impact of advice, legal aid, design of legal services and public understanding
of the law. Previous teaching has included the ‘Law in the Real World’ LLM
module which introduces students to key social science research designs and
methods, before discussing key empirical studies and the interaction between
research and policy. Current teaching includes the undergraduate ‘Law and
Social Inquiry course’, which develops the idea of exploring law from a social
science perspective, and encourages students to conduct their own empirical
research projects. This aims to allow students to engage with and seek to
answers to key empirical questions for the future of law, legal practice and
justice institutions.
He also integrates empirical
research and a social science approach into non-empirical based courses. This
includes empirical sessions as part of the undergraduate BASc ‘Law in Action’
and LLB ‘Access to Justice’ programmes.
He also contributes to the PhD
programme, conducting seminars on empirical research methods. Since joining
UCL, he has supervised eight PhD students where empirical research formed a
component of their studies.
Education
- Liverpool John Moores University
- Doctorate, Doctor of Philosophy | 2001
- University of Stirling
- First Degree, Bachelor of Science | 1998
Biography
Nigel is Professor of Law and
Social Statistics at UCL. He is also Head of Data, Design and Analysis at PPL,
an independent researcher and consultant. He is a leading expert in empirical
legal studies, with particular expertise in statistical analysis and empirical
research methodology. He is also co-director of the Centre for Empirical Legal
Studies at UCL. He works across a broad range of projects (spanning civil and
criminal justice) though he has specific interest in the application of social
science and modern quantitative methods to explore how the general public
understand and interact with the law. All of his research is multidisciplinary
and collaborative, with a specific focus on methodological innovation and
rigour. His work adapts methods from a broad range of disciplines, including
psychology, epidemiology, education, health, mathematics and
statistics. He is also a chartered statistician and chartered scientist.
Nigel's work is methodologically innovative and he has
been the first to introduce a number of methods into legal research; including
multilevel modelling, discrete time event history analysis and most recently
modern psychometrics (for legal capability scale development). He has published
over 100 academic papers, reports, book chapters and books, including research
in leading journals in law, social policy, epidemiology, geography and health.
Much of his research is designed for a policy audience and his survey work (in
collaboration with Professor Pascoe Pleasence) has become central to the
development of access to justice policy in England and Wales. It also has
international significance, supporting global access to justice initiatives and
progress under the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goal 16. Nigel also works with a number of organisations in other
jurisdictions, in particularly in Australia with colleagues at the Law and
Justice Foundation of New South Wales.