The School of Law at De Montfort University Leicester (DMU) has been ranked as one the very best in the UK, and in the world, when it comes to spreading knowledge and ideas.

The respected Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings by Subject for 2026, has placed DMU’s School of Law second in the UK, and 13^th in the world, for Research Quality.

THE produces its Research Quality metric as an indicator of “a university’s role in spreading knowledge and ideas”. It is based on five separate measures: citation impact, research strength, research excellence and research influence.

One of their key calculations was how often DMU research has been cited by other academics around the world, weighted in favour of citation in serious, important scholarship. According to THE, measuring citations reaveals: “whose research has stood out, has been picked up and built on by other scholars and, most importantly, has been shared around the global scholarly community to expand the boundaries of our understanding.”

DMU legal scholars have recently made influential research contributions in a number of areas including, among others: manslaughter, diminished responsibility, fitness to plead, and police powers - including stop and search, as well as in constitutional and administrative law, intellectual property, governance of global markets and money laundering.

Professor Julia Shaw, Director of the Centre for Law and Social Justice at DMU, said: “Our distinctive contribution is recognised internationally for its rigour, impact and significance.

“We focus on those challenges which have the greatest impact on society’s most vulnerable. Through our research and policy work, we are committed to critically addressing the role of law and policymaking in promoting or even inhibiting social justice.” 

In the last three years alone, legal research at DMU has been recognised by major European funders, attracting grants worth almost €11.5million.

Current legal research at DMU includes work on: labour market regulation and policy, employment law reform, public finance management reform, law and responsible technologies, cyberwarfare, and international humanitarian law, and includes a broad range of interdisciplinary projects.

Alan East Head of Leicester De Montfort Law School, said: “We're committed to confronting complex and often intractable challenges. Our researchers engage directly with real-world problems, developing solutions that influence legal thinking, policy development, and law-making both nationally and internationally. To find ourselves positioned so highly for ‘Research Quality’ in the Times Higher Education World Rankings by Siubject is something I am immensely proud of. It is testament to the hard work of all researchers in the law school led by our talented professors”. 

Posted on Thursday 12 March 2026