The 2022 OULS Bumper Christmas Album

Shaun Wallace from ITV's The Chase stands with members of the OU's Faculty of Business and Law

Blog post by Hugh McFaul

A quick look at the website of a well known national bookseller will reveal that a staple of my childhood, The Christmas Annual, is still big business. This bookseller claims that ‘Along with turkey, stuffing, stockings and a few too many glasses of sherry, annuals are a Christmas tradition’ and it is certainly true that Christmas often prompts us to look back over the ups and downs of the old year before welcoming in the new.

So, it’s in that Yuletide spirit that I offer the following eclectic small selection box of some of the highlights from a year in the life of The Open University Law School.

2022 saw some important milestones in our research culture. Our successful first entry into the national Research Excellence Framework exercise rated one-third of our outputs as internationally excellent (3*) or world-leading (4*) and two-thirds of the impact cases were rated as internationally excellent.

We also welcomed two new law Professors to the School; Natalia Szablewska (Professor in Law and Society) and Stephanie Pywell (Professor of Law and Social Justice) and celebrated a range of high profile publications and research projects including the launch of a new observatory examining the global problem of online forms of violence against women.

Professor Pywell celebrating her inaugural lecture December 2022

Book cover for Laura Noakes' book

Other highlights included some collaborations with the BBC, including a short film on representing yourself in court, a children’s book deal for recent OULS PhD graduate Laura Noakes, LLB student Bethany England’s contribution to the Lionesses Euro 2022 success and a very popular visit from barrister Dr Shaun Wallace aka The Dark Destroyer from the popular gameshow The Chase (pictured at the top of this post).

2022 also saw the launch of our new OULS Blog which provides a platform for contributions from our vibrant community of academics and students from across the four nations of the UK.

So, to borrow a stock phrase from one of my old Christmas Annuals, this has been a bumper year and there’s plenty more to look forward to in 2023, not least that we’ll be celebrating 25 years of the OU Law School.

Keep in touch via our website and Twitter feed @OU_Law