She earned a masters degree by dissertation, which was later published by Athlone Press, writing on the seventeenth century charter controversies. However, her recruitment in 1964 by Professor Roger Crane into a team setting up the new law faculty at Queen Mary College, London, would set a different pattern to her professional life.

Jenny became a family law specialist, writing three editions of Sweet and Maxwell’s Family law, and developing a portfolio of academic editing roles, including membership of the Modern Law Review editorial board that was to last for more than three decades. She wrote extensively on families, children, and the matrimonial home, taking her place in the politics of family law. With her typical organisational flair she gave birth to her son, John, during the Christmas vacation in 1967.

During the 1970s she built a repertoire of law-based campaigning activities, channelled principally through the then National Council for One Parent Families (NCOPF – now merged with Gingerbread) for whom she was vice-chair (1984–88) and the Family Rights Group (chair: 1986–90). Her voluntary work with NCOPF included lobbying for the implementation of the Report of the Committee on One-Parent Families (the Finer report), and the successful campaign to remove ‘illegitimacy’ as a statutory term.1Report of the Committee on One-Parent Families Cmnd 5629, HMSO, 1974.

Her extra-curricular activities found a new outlet when she was approached to become co-director, with Ole Hansen, of the Legal Action Group in 1978. The legal aid sector had grown in response to the legal aid scheme introduced in the 1960s. A strong group of innovative lawyers had come to prominence seeking a more global and effective delivery of justice, moving to form LAG in 1972.

LAG needed to be taken beyond the first base established by the founding director, Susan Marsden-Smedley. At the same time the Royal Commission on Legal Services reported (the Benson report), failing to deliver the coherent, forward-looking strategy that had been hoped for.2Report of the Royal Commission on Legal Services Cmnd 7648, HMSO, 1979. The Law Society also was in control of a creaking legal aid system and had yet to overhaul its establishment-oriented approach.

Jenny and Ole launched a blistering and sustained critique of Benson, at the same time leading LAG to operate at a higher, more professional level in political, media and publishing spheres. She extended the range and quality of its courses and catalogue of publications, which upheld the vital legal aid and advice sectors, already plagued by cuts. It was typical of her thoroughness that she disbarred (from Gray’s Inn) at this point in order to qualify as a solicitor, though never entering private practice.

In 1983 Jenny left LAG to become Head of the Law Department at South Bank Polytechnic (now London South Bank University), later becoming Dean of the social science faculty. At South Bank she supported an innovative range of new educational techniques aimed at improving equal access to the legal profession, including Minority Access to the Legal Profession Project, the first access course to a law degree in the country, and an early version of the clinical undergraduate programmes that are now common. Jenny also supported the development of a Certificate in Applied Advice Work and a part-time course for Law Society finals.

As a manager, Jenny was impatient with academic politics, focusing instead on representing the law school’s interests when such radical approaches to the student experience were under pressure from a Conservative government.

In 1992, Jenny was recruited to Swansea University to found the new law school. With this appointment came the professorship she had been seeking. She had been irked by women’s comparative lack of success in obtaining university chairs, seeing it as another manifestation of discrimination against women in general and mothers in particular.

Jenny retired from the law school in 2005. Her legacy is a staff complement of 40, including 14 professors, working in mainstream undergraduate, postgraduate and professional training, and supporting specialist centres for criminal justice criminology, environmental and energy law and policy, international and European law, shipping and trade, and the Welsh legal tradition. She continued in academic law as Professor Emeritus at the University of Westminster, developing also her interest in professional ethics and co-authoring with Professor Andrew Boon The ethics and conduct of lawyers in England and Wales, a definitive text, the third edition of which was in preparation when she died.32nd edn, Hart Publishing, 2008.

As a professorial departmental head, Jenny served on committees set up by government and non-governmental organisations, drawing on her long-standing interests in legal services and a network of friendships and contacts, many dating back to the time when NCOPF, LAG and the Levin home were all in Kentish Town, north London.

In all the years of academic leadership, she held fast to a mission to put law to the service of ordinary people. While at South Bank she chaired the Legal Services Group of the National Association of Citizens Advice Bureaux. Following the move to Swansea, she became immersed in local activities, entering Citizens Advice Bureaux (CABx) service both at her local Swansea bureau where, in retirement, she was an adviser and tribunal representative, and also at national level, producing strategic reports on the Welsh CABx service, and chairing the Wales Committee in 2003. She first represented Wales, and then chaired the national (England and Wales) Membership and Standards Committee.

Whenever she could, Jenny dispensed what she called ‘legal magic’ to improve the lives of those struggling to get by, be it founding Swansea’s first credit union, or leading residents in her block of flats to create a limited company to transform the land outside their homes for accessible recreation.

With such a mountain of good work under her belt, it would be easy to conclude that she was a bit of a geek, spending Saturday night with an official report. In fact she engaged completely with every area of life. The marriage to Peter absorbed her into a Jewish family in which she assiduously mastered the expected culinary skills, and a full freezer. She could be heard at work commenting on the hazards of tasting raw gefilte fish mixture even as she drafted a new chapter of The benefits handbook. Jenny was a pianist and cellist, and sang with a true alto voice, both with friends in London and two Swansea chorales right up to her last bout of illness.

Her marriage to Peter broke down in the early 1980s. However, their relationship was amicable and, towards the end of her life, Peter was the source of strong support and comfort. All of Jenny’s relationships were warm and personal and, whenever appropriate, she never maintained a distinction between her working and ‘home’ lives. Her relationship with her son, John, a historian, proved deep and mutually supportive over the years.

After the move to Swansea, she maintained a foothold in London, keeping up academic, theatre-going and social activities in both places throughout her last decade. She was an active humanist, loved the Gower peninsula, walked and read, pursuing all the gentle fulfilling interests of the intellectual middle class and, crucially, wasted not a single minute of her life. A veteran of many narrow boat holidays with her brother Dick, and sister-in-law Pauline, she earned the title ‘good helmswoman’.

She is survived by John and Peter.