Professor Joan Loughrey

The SLS is a learned society with charitable status whose aim is the advancement of legal education and scholarship in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Professor Loughrey is a professor at the school of law at Queen’s University Belfast and former head of school. Her research interests are corporate law, corporate governance and the regulation of the legal profession.

The last time the presidency and the Society’s annual conference, a prominent event in the field, was hosted at Queen’s was around seventy years ago, in the mid -1950s, under the presidency of Professor J. Louis Montrose, Dean of the Law faculty for over 20 years.

Professor Loughrey said: “The Society of Legal Scholars has been an invaluable source of academic collegiality and support to me throughout my career, from my earliest days as a junior academic. I am deeply honoured to have the opportunity to serve, as president, a community that has provided so much support to me and to others.

“I am also enormously proud that the Society’s annual conference will be held in Belfast at Queen’s on 7 – 9 September 2027, an event that draws in academics from across these islands and further afield. The theme of the conference is ‘Exploring Communities of Law and Legal Scholarship’ and it invites reflection on the role of legal scholarship in contributing to and sustaining the rule of law and on the importance of academic communities at a time of global turmoil, unprecedented disruption within the higher education sector, and with AI changing the profession that many of our students are entering.”

Professor Joan Loughrey is preceded by Professor Claudina Richards (University of East Anglia).