What’s your job title and how long have you been at Loughborough?

I am Professor of Law and Philosophy in the Department of Law and I have been at Loughborough since September 2025.

Tell us what a typical day in your job looks like?

My typical day mainly revolves around research and writing papers, funding applications, and a monograph. The Law Department is new, and the first cohort of undergraduates arrive this academic year, but I am not due to begin teaching until next academic year. Since September, I have a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to write a book under contract, so each day is devoted to work on this. 

What’s your favourite project you’ve worked on?

My favourite is the AHRC-funded project, ‘Judging Values and Participation in Mental Capacity Law’, which I led as Principal Investigator. This was an interdisciplinary exploration of how legal practitioners and retired judges in the Court of Protection understood values and the participation of court users within their decision-making. We experienced a major setback from the get-go through the changeover of senior judges which meant our original plan of interviewing sitting judges was no longer viable.

But rather than being catastrophic to our research, we managed to generate interesting data and valuable analytic insights through our focus on legal practitioners and retired judges. By the end of the project, not only had we produced incredibly high-quality research, but the same judges who denied us access ended up coming to our final project conference. It was deeply satisfying to have the buy-in of a full range of legal professionals in the end. And I worked with an absolutely wonderful project team, proving the core principle that intellectually satisfying collaborative work relies on working with people who are trustworthy, reliable, and fundamentally kind.

What is your proudest moment at Loughborough?

I am new to Loughborough, so I’m not sure I have a proudest moment, though I am sure that the launch of the LLB in the Law Department will certainly be something to celebrate!

Which University value do you most resonate with and why?

The value that most resonates with me is creative. This speaks to my own career trajectory, which has been difficult to put in a box and is highly transdisciplinary. I started out in philosophy, have had a research-intensive background within numerous interdisciplinary projects (which involved even being in a psychiatry department and working closely with clinicians), and I have somehow ended up in law. I like to think my intellectual approach is fundamentally curious and open to new ways of thinking. I sincerely appreciate how other disciplines might have a different prism to the same questions I have. Equally, what I cannot abide is intellectual closure – the rigid adherence to certain analytic frameworks that forecloses such curiosity and openness. In designing projects, for example, I cannot imagine having an intellectually siloed, singular approach. My work is increasingly trying to bring together different insights from philosophy, anthropology, and the creative arts to certain legal and ethical questions and what results, in my mind, is a much more enriched picture of a phenomenon or problem. 

Tell us something you do outside of work that we might not know about?

I have six-year-old twins and the struggle to not become an Asian Tiger Mum is real…

What is your favourite quote?

“Goodness is connected with the acceptance of real death and real chance and real transience and only against the background of this acceptance, which is psychologically so difficult, can we understand the full extent of what virtue is like.”

Iris Murdoch, ‘The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts’

If you would like to feature in ‘Five Minutes With’, or you work with someone who you think would be great to include, please email Martha Causier at m.causier@lboro.ac.uk.