Our Objectives

Attracting and supporting high quality PhD researchers by encouraging Master’s level students who have shown an interest in further study. Our PhD researchers are integral to our work and are integrated into the Law School by providing opportunities for teaching as well as dissemination of their research. They are essential to our plans to ensure sustainable research in years to come.

We continue attracting PhD researchers to our main commercial areas of research expertise: Insolvency Law, Intellectual Property Law and Financial Law. It is crucial to a sustainable and vital research environment to have a balanced mix of PhD researchers, early career researchers (‘ECRs’) and experienced researchers. This ensures that we remain up-to-date in our research fields, with enthusiastic colleagues who continually challenge us to be cutting-edge researchers.

The Law Research Centre is part of the West Midlands Legal Doctoral Network, giving our PhD researchers access to a professional network in the region.

The continued success of WLJ, with contributions from research students, members of staff and external contributors (UK and overseas).WLJ is a peer-reviewed, gold open-access academic journal, published by the Law Research Centre at the University of Wolverhampton (hard copy: ISSN 2517-8121; online: ISSN 2632-1343). All articles are subject to the Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Creative Commons Licence. This means that all content is freely available without charge to the user or their institution. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author. WLJ is listed on the Directory of Open Access Journals.

WLJ is of strategic importance, as it emphasises to students our standing as an established research institution. The Editorial Board includes illustrious alumni, senior figures drawn from the judiciary, legal profession and academia. WLJ publishes a wide array of outputs in the field of law and law-related subjects and is relevant to students, academics and practitioners.

It demonstrates our commitment to open access and shares, in a transparent manner, up-to-date world-leading research. WLJ also offers the opportunity to write, honour, and disseminate research on special topics: for example, the first Special Issue on Women in Law and Criminal Justice in 2019.  There are no limits as to who can be an author, and all articles are subject to double blind peer review.

Applying successfully for externally or internally funded research projects, which are likely to have impact outside of academia. This has been a particular area of emphasis and growth for us in the past decade or so. We are particularly committed to research projects in the areas of Insolvency Law, Policing and Intellectual Property reform, both within the UK and overseas. In addition to pre-existing relationships with external funders, we have expanded our vision to be even more international by continuing to make bids to the European Commission and also to bid, successfully, for support from INSOL International. We have had a number of successful, impact-driven research projects funded by the University through the Early Researcher Award Scheme and the Lord Paul Fellowship scheme.

We aim to support our staff with workshops, mentoring and resources in publishing their research in both general and specialist law  journals, books, reports and other print media. Staff have published in for example: Law Quarterly Review, Legal Studies, Public Law, Criminal Law Review, the Journal of Business Law, the Journal of Legal History, Common Law World Review, Policing and Society, Oxford Journal of Law and Religion, Company Lawyer and Statute Law Review and in addition have produced numerous authored books and reports that have made a significant contribution to academic knowledge and understanding. The LRC is committed to the San Francisco DORA declaration and we value the quality of research outputs ahead of where that research is published.