Beverley Clough

Professor Beverley Clough

Early Career Fellow 2018

The Spaces of Mental Capacity Law: Moving Beyond Binaries

The research aims to provide a contextual understanding of mental capacity law and the processes underpinning it, in order to enable broader reflection on disability and embodiment beyond the traditional confines of mental capacity literature. Literature in this context currently flattens the debate and decontextualizes and dehumanizes the legal subject. Through engaging with relational theories which emphasise the spatial and temporal dimensions - as well as the actors who inhabit these dimensions - we get a more nuanced account of the ways in which disempowerment is created and reinforced through these relations.

More information

Areas of interest

Law Social Justice Health Disability Social Care Feminist Theory Disability Studies Mental Health Temporality Bioethics

Cohort

ECF4

Biography

Beverley Clough is Professor of Law and Social Justice at the Manchester Metropolitan University. Her research focuses on the intersections between health law, disability law and social care. She interrogates these through the lens of feminist legal theory and critical disability studies, with a particular focus currently on spatial and temporal dimensions of law. Beverley is currently researching issues including mental capacity, consent to sex and intimacy; law and home in the context of disability; temporality in the UNCRPD; and the role of doulas in medical law.

Beverley obtained her PhD in Bioethics & Medical Jurisprudence at the University of Manchester. This focused on relational approaches to mental capacity law. Following that she held academic positions at the University of Liverpool and the University of Leeds before joining Manchester Law School in 2023.

Her monograph, The Spaces of Mental Capacity Law: Moving Beyond Binaries was published in the Routledge Social Justice Series and was shortlisted for the SLS Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship in 2022.

Beverley is a trustee and executive board member for the Socio-Legal Studies Association (SLSA). She is an Assistant Editor (Book Reviews) for Medical Law Review, and a member of the Executive Committee for the International Journal of Disability and Social Justice.

Biographical details correct as of 06.02.25