Dr Sophie Turenne
- University Associate Professor in Comparative Law
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About
Dr Sophie Turenne is Associate Professor in Comparative Law and Academic Secretary of the Faculty of Law. She is also Director of Studies and Fellow in Law at King’s College, and Fellow Emerita of Murray Edwards College. She is President of the British Association of Comparative Law and an elected member of the International Academy of Comparative Law and the Société de Législation Comparée. She has previously served as Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Cambridge Yearbook of European Legal Studies, Co-Director of the Centre for European Legal Studies, and one of the Deputy Directors of the LLM.
Earlier appointments at Cambridge were University Neil Allam/Clifford Chance Lecturer (2003–2010), Senior College Lecturer at Murray Edwards College (2010–2018; 2021–2023), Affiliated Lecturer (2010–2018), and University Lecturer in EU Law (2018–2021). A former ERASMUS student (Oxford–Paris II exchange), she studied law after completing a year in Humanities (hypokhâgne). She earned her PhD in Law at the University of Paris II Panthéon-Assas and received several national doctoral scholarships, including the Lavoisier Scholarship (French Ministry of Foreign Affairs) and the Entente Cordiale Scholarship (British Council), which supported two years of doctoral research at Oxford, a teaching and research fellowship (ATER), and the CNRS Mobilité Internationale scholarship.
Dr Turenne has contributed to policy and expert work on judicial institutions in the UK and internationally. She has served as an invited expert for OSCE-ODIHR, including on the 2010 and 2023 editions of the Kyiv Recommendations on Judicial Independence, and has conducted research for the Judicial Appointments Commission of England and Wales, the UK Ministry of Justice and the Senior Salaries Review Body.At Cambridge, Dr Turenne has taught undergraduate and postgraduate courses such as Comparative Law, Constitutional Law, Constitutional Law of the European Union, European Union Law, Public Law (seminar), and The Judiciary in a Comparative Perspective. She supervises doctoral research in comparative law and judicial studies and welcomes expressions of interest in these fields.
Research
Comparative law, Comparative legal reasoning, Constitutional law, European Law, Judicial independence, Judicial studies, The right to a fair trial, Empirical socio-legal research.
Most of Dr Turenne’s research examines courts and the judiciary, principally in the UK and Europe. Her work focuses on judicial independence, accountability and legitimacy; judicial governance and ethics; judicial appointments; and the beliefs and institutional practices that shape adjudication and the right to a fair trial. Her research combines comparative legal analysis, empirical socio-legal methods and insights from political science. It has informed public policy and European standards on judicial independence. She was a Co-Reporter and lead drafter of the ELI–Mt Scopus European Standards of Judicial Independence (2024) and has conducted commissioned empirical research for the UK Ministry of Justice on motivations to apply for salaried judicial office. She co-founded EuroJudge, an international research network on judging and the judiciary, in 2025. Her Research Handbook on Judging and the Judiciary (2025), co-edited with Dr Mohamed Moussa, brings together legal, socio-legal and political science perspectives on courts and adjudication.Research centres: Cambridge Socio-Legal Group (CSLG); Centre for European Legal Studies (CELS); Centre for Public Law (CPL)