Mark Walters is a Professor of Criminal Law and Criminology and Deputy Head of Sussex Law School. His research interests are focused primarily on hate crime studies, as well as criminal law and criminal justice reform with a special emphasis on restorative justice practice and theory. Mark previously completed his doctorate in law (criminology) specialising in hate crime and restorative justice at the Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford (2012).

His book, Criminalising Hate: Law as Social Justice Liberalism won the British Society of Criminology Hate Crime Network Sophie and Sylvia Lancaster Book Prize 2023. It sets out a new theory for understanding the harms of hate crime and provides the first global analysis of hate crime laws.