Professor Mary Seneviratne

Mary Seneviratne is Professor of Law and Director of Research at Nottingham Law School, Nottingham Trent University. She has an LLB from Leeds University, an MA and PhD from Sheffield University, and qualified as a solicitor in 1972. After a brief period of practice in local government, she joined Sheffield City Polytechnic (as it was then) as a lecturer in Law, and has also worked at Sheffield University as a Research Fellow.

She joined Nottingham Law School in 1998, as a Research Professor, and has been Head of Department and Associate Dean, before taking on her present role as Director of Research. She has researched and published widely in relation to ombudsmen, complaints procedures, civil and administrative justice, alternative dispute resolution, and governance of the professions. She is the author of Ombudsmen: Public Services and Administrative Justice (Butterworths, 2002), The Legal Profession: Regulation and the Consumer (Sweet and Maxwell, 1999), and the "Ombudsman Title" in Atkins Court Forms (LexisNexis, 2008).

She is a member of the Executive Committee of the Socio-Legal Studies Association, a member of the British and Irish Ombudsman Association, a member of the Administriative Justice and Tribunals Council and the substitute member for the UK on the Council of Europe Group of Independent Experts on the Charter for Local Self Government. In 1999, she gave evidence in relation to the public sector ombudsmen review to the House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee, and she was the advisor to the Justice 1 Committee of the Scottish Parliament in its enquiry into the regulation of the legal profession from 2001 to 2002.