Skip to main content

Prof Patrick Hanafin

Positions held:
  • Professor of Law, Birkbeck Law School
  • Overview

    Overview

    Biography

    Professor Patrick Hanafin BA (Limerick), PhD (Dublin City) joined the Law School at Birkbeck as a lecturer in 1999 from the University of Sussex, and was appointed to a Chair in 2008. Professor Hanafin has also held a visiting fellowship at Harvard Law School (1998-99), has been a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence (2002-2003), and a Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Law, University of Pretoria (July 2008). He was a Visiting Research Professor at the University of Capetown in the Autumn term 2012.

    Patrick co-directs the School’s Centre for Law and the Humanities.

  • Research

    Research

    Research interests

    • Law and literature, reproductive rights and politics
  • Supervision and teaching

    Supervision and teaching

    Supervision

    Supervisions within Birkbeck:
    3

    Current doctoral researchers

    • TAZ BROOKES
      Nature of supervision:
      Principal Supervisor, onwards
      Title of thesis:
      Intersecting Legal Frameworks and Neurodiversity: A Critical Examination of the Role and Impact of International and National Anti-Discrimination Laws on the UK legal system, profession and education through a socio-legal context.©
      Description:

      This doctoral inquiry is an act of translation between lived cognition and the law that governs it. It examines how the UK’s equality frameworks — from the Equality Act 2010 to the UNCRPD — recognise, or fail to recognise, neurodiversity as a way of reasoning rather than merely a category of difference. The project challenges the legal system’s quiet assumption that fairness is achieved through uniform rationality, exposing how this presumption narrows the field of justice itself.

      Adopting an original jurisprudential framework developed through my own professional and neurodivergent experience, the research blends doctrinal analysis with reflective legal ethnography. Rather than observing law from the outside, it works through law from within — tracing how cognition, advocacy, and institutional logic collide in real-world contexts of education, regulation, and access to justice.

      Its novelty lies not only in method but in standpoint: it is written through three intersecting lenses — practitioner, researcher, and litigant in person — each revealing how procedural ideals of “reasonableness” obscure cognitive diversity. The work argues that equality cannot be enacted solely through legal compliance; it must emerge through epistemic reform — an evolution of how law defines who counts as rational.

      The thesis proposes a new field of Cognitive Jurisprudence: a living, adaptive model through which legal education, governance, and professional ethics can evolve to recognise cognitive plurality as essential to justice, not peripheral to it.

    Doctoral alumni since 2013-14

    • CLAIRE HORN
      Nature of supervision:
      Joint Principal Supervisor, to
      Title of thesis:
      Gestation Beyond Mother/Machine: Legal Frameworks for Artificial Wombs, Abortion, and Care
      Awarded:
      2020

    Teaching

    Teaching modules

    • Healthcare and Human Rights (LADD029S7)
    • Law Masters Research Project (LALA004S7)
    • Contemporary Issues in Medical Law and Ethics (LALW049H6)
    • Principles of Medical Law and Ethics (LALW050H6)
    • Critical Research Masterclass (LALW065S7)