Iyiola Solanke

I am the University’s Jacques Delors Professor of EU Law.

My research interests fall in the fields of EU integration and racial integration. I write on race and racism, anti-discrimination law and intersectional discrimination, social movements, the judiciary in Europe, and EU governance. My work is historical, empirical and socio-legal. 

Previous research projects have focused on the impact of separate opinions on judicial authority, the Advocate General in the  CJEU,  social action and legal reform; cause lawyering; and black and migrant women in European welfare states.

I organise an international forum which investigates black experiences of policing in the EU and the Black Female Professors Forum to promote black women in academia. I sit on the General Council of the International Society for Public Law (ICON-S).

I graduated from the London School of Economics with a PhD in Law. I joined the School of Law at the University of Leeds in 2010. In 2017, I was elected an Academic Bencher of Inner Temple and appointed a member of the Valuation Tribunal for England (VTE). I founded the Temple Women’s Forum North in 2013 to extend the outreach work of Inner and Middle Temples to legal professionals in the North and North East. 

Previously, I was Professor of EU Law and Social Justice in the University of Leeds’ School of Law. I am a Visiting Professor at Wake Forest University Law School and I have been a Visiting Professor at Science Po, Grenoble in France. I have held Fellowships at the University of Michigan Law School (Ann Arbor, USA), Pompeu Fabra Universidad (Barcelona, Spain), the University of Sydney Law School (Sydney, Australia), McGill University Law School (Montreal, Canada) and at New Hall, Cambridge University. In 2018 I was a Fernand Braudel Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy and also a Visiting Professor at Harvard School of Public Health, working with STRIPED on weight stigma and anti-weight discrimination law.

In addition to numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals, my published work includes a textbook on EU Law (Pearson 2015) as well as two monographs: ‘Making Anti-Racial Discrimination Law (Routledge 2011) and ‘Discrimination as Stigma – A Theory of Anti-Discrimination Law’ (Hart 2017). I am also an Editor on ‘Eutopialaw’ run by Matrix Chambers.

Research projects

Any research projects I’m currently working on will be listed below. Our list of all research projects allows you to view and search the full list of projects in the faculty.

• Co-POWeR: Consortium on Practices for Wellbeing and Resilience in BAME Families and Communities