Mrs Louise Taylor

Professional biography

Louise is a Senior Lecturer in Law, having joined the Open University Law School in 2019. Prior to that she was a Senior Lecturer in Law at Nottingham Trent University from 2006-2017. Louise gained her LLB (Hons) Scots Law and Diploma in Legal Practice from the University of Dundee. She then went on to complete her PGCHE and LLM at Nottingham Trent University. Louise is a member of the Socio-Legal Studies Association and the Association of Law Teachers. She is also a Senior Fellow of Advance HE and a mentor for the Applaud Scheme, the OU's scheme for accrediting and promoting professional learning and academic development.

Research interests

Louise's main areas of research interest relate to criminal law and victims' rights. She is currently researching the criminal law's response to coercively controlled defendants who commit crime as a result of the domestic abuse they have suffered, with a particular focus on the development of a coercive control defence to address the gaps evident in the existing criminal law defences regime. She is also interested in criminal justice system decision-making as it relates to vulnerable victims and defendants, and the admissibility of expert evidence in court. Within the Open University Law School Louise is a member of the Feminism, Law and Gender (FLAG) research cluster and the Brain Science and Law (BraSciL) research cluster.

Scholarship interests

Louise was previously a member of the Law School's peer mentoring project and worked as part of the OU APP/APS task and finish group on peer mentoring to produce the OU Peer Mentoring Framework. Louise is current working on a project which considers what we can learn from Cognitive Load Theory to help shape the design of digital legal learning. Louise is also the author of the 12th Edition of Elliott and Quinn's Criminal Law textbook published by Pearson in 2018.

Teaching interests

Louise has considerable teaching experience and has taught criminal law, criminology and public law subjects at undergraduate level. She has also supervised several PhDs and taught victims' rights and criminal justice at postgraduate level. At the Open University Louise teaches on a variety of modules across the curriculuum. She was also the module chair (production) for the W111 Criminal Law and the Courts and W321 SQE: Legal System, Public Law and Criminal Litigation modules.  

Impact and engagement

Louise was invited to join two EU funded projects related to victims' rights as a national expert. For one of these she contributed a publication to the final conference proceedings Louise also recently contributed as an expert on Scots Criminal Law to the Nuffield Foundation's funded project 'Mapping the Changing Face of Cross-Examination in Criminal Trials'. Louise has previously been invited to speak as an expert on legal education, most notably at the Fifth National Spanish Conference on Legal Education held in Valencia.

External collaborations

Louise's collaboration with Professor Jonathan Doak at Nottingham Trent University has helped develop their work in the field of victims' rights, resulting in several notable publications.