Dr Lucy Crompton

Dr Lucy Crompton is an ESRC Post-doctoral Fellow in the Law School, conducting her project 'Judging the Judges: Bringing Transparency to Judicial Reasoning'.

Lucy is a non-practising solicitor with extensive lecturing experience, specialising in Family Law. 

Lucy took the bold decision to leave her job aged 48 to pursue a full-time PhD, driven by a deep commitment to achieving meaningful impact and contributing to social justice. Her PhD was awarded by the University of Warwick in 2025 for her thesis entitled ‘Post-divorce disparity in earning capacity: unpicking the insidious gender discrimination in financial remedies law’, funded by the ESRC.  Lucy's thesis investigated how the law of financial remedies on divorce systemically prioritises financial over non-financial contributions, reinforcing gendered economic disparities. While existing scholarship critiques this bias, Lucy went further by exposing the mechanics of judicial decision-making that entrenched it. She developed a theoretical framework using the concept of social reproduction to demonstrate how financial remedies law fails adequately to account for the long-term economic disadvantages faced by spouses (predominantly wives) who prioritise unpaid care work. The framework demonstrates how the law perpetuates the global undervaluation of women’s unpaid labour and offers insights for achieving equitable, non-discriminatory outcomes post-divorce.

Lucy's current ESRC funded Post-doctoral Fellowship is the next step in her research journey, enabling her to progress the innovative work she started in her PhD thesis. For more information about her project, please see the 'Research Activities' tab.