Dame Hazel Genn is Professor of Socio-Legal Studies in the Faculty of Laws at UCL.

Dame Hazel is a leading authority on access to civil and administrative justice. Her prize winning scholarship focuses on the experiences of ordinary people caught up in legal problems and the responsiveness of the justice system to the needs of citizens. She has conducted numerous empirical studies on public access to the justice system and has published widely in her specialist fields

She was Dean of the Faculty 2008-2017 and is currently Director of the UCL Centre for Access to Justice and Co-director of the UCL Judicial Institute. She previously held a Chair and was Head of the Department of Law at Queen Mary, University of London. Before joining London University, she held full-time research posts at Oxford University Centre for Socio-Legal Studies (1974-1985) and the Cambridge Institute of Criminology (1972-74).

She served for eight years as Deputy Chair and then Chair of the Economic and Social Research Council's Research Grants Board. In recognition of her work on civil justice, she was awarded a CBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours List in 2000 and appointed DBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours List in 2006. In 2006 she was also appointed Queen's Counsel Honoris Causa. In 2008 she was elected Honorary Master of the Bench of Gray's Inn.