Joanna Gilmore

Profile

Biography

Dr Joanna Gilmore

LLB (Newcastle), MRes (Manchester), PhD (Manchester), PGCAP (York)

Senior Lecturer, York Law School | Associate, Centre for Applied Human Rights

Dr Joanna Gilmore is a Senior Lecturer at York Law School and an Associate of the Centre for Applied Human Rights. She is a socio-legal researcher whose work examines policing, public order law, protest governance, and counter-terrorism through the lens of historical injustice and transitional justice. A central organising theme of her current research is how law, policy, and institutions can deliver guarantees of non-recurrence—the reforms, accountability mechanisms, and practices needed to prevent the repetition of harm—particularly in contexts of police misconduct and state violence.

Joanna’s current research programme connects contemporary controversies over policing and protest to longer histories of institutional power and resistance. Her interest in transitional justice frameworks is grounded in sustained work on police misconduct and the long shadow of contested policing histories, including her research on the 1984-85 miners’ strike and related projects on state responses to dissent. This work foregrounds questions of truth recovery, institutional accountability, and repair, and focuses on how standards of non-recurrence translate into concrete institutional reform, oversight, and preventative practice.

Methodologically, Joanna combines doctrinal analysis with community-engaged socio-legal research and oral history methodologies. She has partnered with National Life Stories at the British Library, drawing on oral history as both evidence and method—capturing lived experience, institutional memory, and the ways harm and resistance are narrated over time. She is also developing, with Dr Mattia Pinto, AI-assisted archival analysis to support the systematic examination of large bodies of historical and institutional records relevant to accountability and non-recurrence, including how institutional learning is recorded, obscured, or denied, and how patterns of harm persist across political and policing contexts.

Joanna has worked closely with a range of UK-based and international human rights organisations and think tanks, including Liberty and The Century Foundation. She also partners with miscarriage of justice charity APPEAL, reflecting a sustained commitment to research that supports accountability, fairness, and remedies where legal and institutional failures have produced profound harm. She is a former National Executive Committee Member of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers and co-founder of the Northern Police Monitoring Project, an independent grassroots organisation working to build community resistance against police violence, harassment and racism. Her research is underpinned by a strong commitment to impact and knowledge exchange; in 2021 she initiated an open letter, signed by over 1,000 law academics, opposing proposals to restrict protest under the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, and produced a briefing for trade unionists on the implications of the proposals for organising.

Joanna graduated from Newcastle University with a First Class LLB as the highest performing student, receiving a number of academic prizes including the Sweet & Maxwell Prize. She then worked for a legal aid law firm in North East England, followed by an educational role with the National Probation Service, before being awarded 1+3 funding at the University of Manchester to complete an ESRC-recognised MRes in Criminology and Socio-Legal Studies. She was awarded a PhD in 2013 for her thesis, This is Not a Riot: Regulation of Protest and the Impact of the Human Rights Act 1998, examined by Professor Robert Reiner (LSE) and Professor David Mead (UEA). Joanna was appointed Lecturer in Law at the University of Manchester in 2012, moved to the University of York as Lecturer in Law in 2013, and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in Law in 2021.

Joanna’s research has attracted significant media coverage informing public debate (including The Guardian, BBC Newsnight, and Channel 4 News), has attracted parliamentary attention, and has had demonstrable impact. Her research on the policing of the anti-fracking movement, for example, contributed to an intervention by the UN Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association and the right to freedom of expression.

Joanna serves on the Editorial Board of Justice, Power and Resistance and is the former Secretary of the European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control. She is currently Co-Director of the Criminalisation of Dissent and Activism Working Group and a member of the Institute of Employment Rights Research Panel.

Joanna is the Widening Participation Tutor and EDI (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion) Research Lead in York Law School, and has taken a leading role in departmental, university, and national initiatives to remove barriers to higher education and the legal profession. She grew up in a former mining town in North East England—an area with historically low progression to higher education—which continues to inform her commitment to widening access and supporting students under-represented in legal education and the profession.

Research

Projects

Title: Lawyers at the coalface: Legal solidarity and the 1984-5 miners’ strike

Funder: British Academy / Leverhulme

The 1984-5 miners’ strike was the longest and most bitterly fought period of industrial action in British history. An extensive body of socio-legal scholarship has documented how the police, the courts, the welfare system and the security services were mobilised against the miners, leading to extensive social disruption and severe hardship within mining communities. Whilst the role of law and legal institutions in undermining the strike is well documented, the contribution of lawyers in furthering the miners' cause has not been explored in the academic literature to date. This socio-legal study will begin to fill this lacuna. In partnership with National Life Stories at the British Library, the study will collate, analyse and archive for online public access, oral history interview recordings and transcripts with twenty-five lawyers and strike participants.

Outputs from this project include:

1. Gilmore, J. (2024). ‘“They really did us proud”: legal solidarity and the 1984-1985 miners’ strike,’ Oral History, Vol. 52, No. 2, pp. 59-72.
2. Gilmore, J. (2024). Which side are you on?’: legal solidarity and the 1984-1985 miners’ strike’ Oral History Online, July 2024.
3. Gilmore, J. (2024) ‘Legal Solidarity and the Miners’ Strike’, National Life Stories Annual Review, October 2024
4. Related publication: Gilmore, J. (2019) ‘Lessons from Orgreave: Police Power and the Criminalisation of Protest,’ Journal of Law and Society, 46(4), pp. 612–639.

Press reports:

Yorkshire Post, 24 September 2024, Fresh appeal to pardon thousands of miners who were convicted 40 years ago.

Title: Wrongful convictions and the 1984-85 miners’ strike: Exploring pathways to justice.

Funder: ESRC IAA Secondment and Mobility Call

With Matt Foot, APPEAL

In partnership with miscarriages of justice charity APPEAL, this secondment addresses wrongful convictions arising from the 1984-85 miners’ strike. APPEAL’s Co-Director, Matt Foot, will be seconded to YLS to facilitate impact from Dr Joanna Gilmore’s BA/Leverhulme-funded research on ‘Legal Solidarity and the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike’. Leveraging academic research and practical insights, the secondee will engage with key stakeholders—policymakers, trade unions, civil society organisations and legal experts—to develop a coherent strategy for addressing strike-related injustices and influencing future law and policy. A comprehensive briefing will propose legal and policy solutions, while a dedicated advisory group will be established to ensure sustained advocacy and policy impact. The secondment will also foster future partnerships between APPEAL, YLS and CAHR to advance emerging research into the relationship between human rights and the politics of decriminalisation, decarceration and criminal clemency.

Title: Justifying Protest in the Courts: Voice, Democracy, and the Law

Funder: British Academy / Leverhulme

With Dr Graeme Hayes (Aston University) and Dr Steven Cammiss (University of Birmingham)

This project investigates the criminal trials of protesters. Despite the significance of trials to campaigns for social and political change, there has been little in-depth research on how the courts provide an arena for democratic challenge. Combining legal analysis with qualitative social research, the project explores the democratic potential of these trials, investigating how expression rights are effectively managed in the criminal justice process. We combine ethnographic observation of four trials with post-trial interviews with defendants and other interested parties to examine: (1) the legal strategies of defendants and legal teams; (2) how court procedures and space function in protest trials; and (3) the political potential of protest trials, and their importance for democracy. We bring together expertise from Sociology, Law, and Politics, and will draw on collaborative ties with campaign groups and NGOs developed through previous work to maximise the impact of the research.

Former projects

Citizen experiences of 'anti-fracking' protest policing in England and Wales

An 18 month study documenting the experiences of individuals taking part in protests against 'fracking' in England and Wales. The study examined how the police response to anti-fracking protests affects citizen engagement with political campaigning. This project was funded by The Morrell Trust.

Outputs from this project include articles in Journal of Law and Society, Policing and Society and Critical Social Policy.

Teaching

Undergraduate

• Criminal Law (Subject Lead)
• Counter Terrorism & Media Case Study (Module Lead)
• Introduction to Law & Society (Module Team)

Postgraduate

• LLM Current Issues in Counter Terrorism (Module Lead)

Publications

Full publications list

You can view a list of Dr Joanna Gilmore's publications on the York Research Database.