Three Open University Law students have been awarded scholarships from the highly regarded Gray’s Inn – one of the four Inns of Court which has the exclusive right to call men and women to the Bar of England and Wales.

The Education for Justice initiative (E4J) of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in which The Open University has played a pivotal role, has won the United Nations Secretary-General 2020 Innovation award.

The Faculty of Business and Law (FBL) become a signatory to the United Nations Principles for Responsible Management Education (UN PRME) in 2020. This follows in the footsteps of The Open University Business School which became a signatory in 2011.

The 2021 edition of the OpenMINDS alumni magazine is introduced by the OU’s Vice-Chancellor, Professor Tim Blackman, and has a wealth of interesting news and information.

Open Justice academics Hugh Mcfaul and Francine Ryan have both contributed to the new Times Higher Education Campus site. You can visit the site and join up for free at this link

The Education for Justice (E4J) online course – developed to prevent crime and promote lawfulness to students – has been translated into Spanish, widening its appeal further than ever before.

Created thanks to a partnership between the OU’s Open Justice Centre and United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), E4J supplies integrity and ethics education resources for schools, colleges and universities around the world.

Christmas is almost upon us, and what better way to celebrate than with the Open Justice Advent Calendar 2020?

From Monday 13 December, we’ll be treating you to a daily festive-themed blog. For 12 days, you’ll be able to read seasonal contributions to this very special blog series by seasoned OU lecturers, new OU colleagues, OU students and Open Justice Centre staff.

Highlights in the seasonal series include a Christmas Eve piece in which Open Justice legal advice is offered to Father Christmas, who finds himself at the centre of a worrying elf employment dispute.

Olivia Leeper and Heidi Key are the joint winners of the ‘Outstanding individual contribution to Open Justice’, with Neil Burlinson as runner-up in this year’s awards.

Joint winner – Olivia Leeper

Olivia took part in the Freedom Law Clinic (FLC) project and has been offered a training contract in a law firm in Norfolk. After obtaining an MA in English Literature in 2004, she worked in publishing and the voluntary sector before studying for the LLB while raising her three children. 

The ‘Outstanding team contribution to Open Justice’ saw a group of five win in this year’s awards, with the runners-up part of the Street Law project.

Winners: Rawtenstall pop-up law clinic project – Daniel Doody, Elizabeth Walker, Jack Brown, Kelly Louise Martin and Lilly May Seddon 

Hugh McFaul, Senior Lecturer and Co-Director of The Open University’s Open Justice Centre, was highly commended in the Most Innovative Teacher of the Year category at The Times Higher Education (THE) Awards last week. The THE Awards recognised outstanding work and exceptional performance across the higher education sector for 2018-19.