Skip to main content

Staff profile

Overview

Dr Emily Roach

Assistant Professor in Financial Law (Education)

Affiliations
Affiliation
Assistant Professor in Financial Law (Education) in the Durham Law School

Biography

Dr Emily Roach is an Assistant Professor in Financial Law (Education) at Durham Law School.

Emily holds an MA and PhD from the University of York and a BA (Hons) in Jurisprudence from the University of Oxford. 

Following her undergraduate degree, Emily completed the Post-Graduate Certificate in Legal Practice (LPC) at the Oxford Institute of Legal Practice. Emily trained at leading City firm Allen & Overy LLP (now A&O Shearman) and qualified into the market-leading restructuring team. As a mid-level associate Emily moved to the London office of Boston-headquartered Ropes & Gray International LLP, specialising in restructuring, distressed debt trading and special situations.

Emily brings practical experience to legal education with extensive first-hand experience representing insolvency officeholders, bondholder committees, hedge counterparties, senior and subordinated lenders and private equity sponsors, acting for stakeholders across the capital structure on complex cross-border restructurings and distressed acquisitions. Much of Emily’s practice was shaped by the 2008 global banking crisis and the collapse of investment bank Lehman Brothers.

Teaching Areas

Emily has extensive lecturing experience on undergraduate, academic postgraduate and professional postgraduate law courses, typically specialising in financial law. 

Emily has developed and convened several postgraduate modules, using real world case studies and contracts to explore the application of financial law and related regulation in practice. Emily has also developed teaching on the business of corporate and financial law and is an experienced lecturer in contract, equity and trusts and company law.

Research interests

  • Financial products and contracts
  • Financial crisis, distressed debt, restructuring and corporate insolvency
  • Debt capital markets, banking and debt finance with a particular interest in structured and leveraged finance
  • Private credit and private equity
  • Financial law, popular culture and the creative industries
  • Law and Literature, Law and Film/Television
  • British and American LGBTQ+ legal histories (broadly from World War I to the present)
  • Legal pedagogy