School of Law

Annika Newnham

Dr Annika Newnham

Senior Lecturer

School of Law

Portsmouth Business School
Richmond Building
Portland Street
Portsmouth
PO1 3DE

annika.newnham@port.ac.uk

Profile

Originally from Sweden, Annika moved to the UK in 1988. In 1994 she embarked on an undergraduate law degree at Sussex, returned there to complete a part-time LLM in 2000, and a DPhil in 2010. Annika previously taught at Sussex as an Associate Tutor and joined the Portsmouth faculty in 2009.

Teaching

Annika is the Level One Tutor and enjoys liaising with the Student Law Society. She also teaches on the Equity & Trusts, Family and Child Law Units.

Research Interests

Annika has recently completed her DPhil entitled “The use of shared residence arrangements in English and Swedish family law: in the child's best interests or a covert resurrection of traditional patriarchal structures?” The thesis compares the Swedish and English orders used to allocate rights & responsibilities between parents, focusing in particular on shared residence. It employs both autopoietic theory and a feminist perspective to consider how concepts like family, equality and parenthood are understood in the two countries and examines law’s over -reliance on rigid definitions and abstract presumptions as well as its inability to recognise the true value of care.

Her research interests lie in the areas of family and property law, particularly in relation to private law disputes over children and the redistribution of ownership in family homes.

Publications

Conference Papers

  • ‘Gendered parental responsibilities’, Gender, Family Responsibility and Legal Change: An International, Interdisciplinary Conference, University of Sussex, July 2008.
  • Section 8 Orders, the Paramountcy Principle and Law's Understandings of Parents' Responsibilities’, SLSA Annual Conference 2009, De Montfort University, April 2009.
  • 'Shared Residence: Lessons from Sweden' SLSA Annual Conference, University of the West of England, April 2010.
  • ‘Why Law is like a Tumble Dryer: Shared Residence and Autopoietic Theory’: SLS Annual Conference, University of Southampton, September 2010
  • 'Using Autopoietic Theory to Explain recent Shared Residence Case Law' at the SLSA Annual Conference at Sussex April 2011.

Memberships

  • Society of Legal Scholars
  • Socio-Legal Studies Association