James Chalmers graduated from the University of Aberdeen and Tulane University, in New Orleans. He took up a senior lectureship at the University of Edinburgh in 2007, prior to which he had taught since 2000 at the University of Aberdeen. He has also taught, on a visiting basis, at the universities of Baltimore, Cape Town, and Maryland, and was a visiting research fellow at Queen Mary, University of London from April until June of 2007.

At Edinburgh, he teaches primarily criminal law and evidence. He is Director of Postgraduate Studies for the School of Law, and also co-director of the MSc in Global Crime, Justice and Security. With effect from volume 15 (2011), he is editor of the Edinburgh Law Review.

In September 2011, he was named as one of the founding members of the Young Academy of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

(1) Doctrinal criminal law, evidence and procedure. Criminal Defences and Pleas in Bar of Trial, written jointly with Fiona Leverick, was published in the Scottish Universities Law Institute series in 2006, and other work has appeared in a variety of journals including the Criminal Law Review and the Modern Law Review. He is assistant editor of Renton and Brown's Criminal Procedure According to the Law of Scotland and is responsible for the Criminal Law section of the Scottish Human Rights Service. He has recently published a third edition of Walker and Walker: The Law of Evidence in Scotland (with Margaret Ross), a second edition of Evidence Essentials, and a fourth edition of A Casebook on Criminal Law in Scotland (with CHW Gane and CN Stoddart).

(2) Empirical criminal justice research. With colleagues at Aberdeen and Glasgow universities (primarily Fiona Leverick), he has carried out empirical research into the Scottish pilot victim statement schemes, reforms to High Court procedure arising from legislation passed in 2004, and (most recently) the first ten years worth of referrals by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission to the High Court. Reports on the first two projects were published by the Scottish Executive in 2007, while the report on the third was published by the Commission in early 2009.

(3) Law and the public health. Some of his early work on criminal law addressed the criminalisation of HIV transmission, which broadened into a wider study of law's application in the context of HIV and AIDS. During 2007, he was on research leave supported by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, working on a book on that subject, Legal Responses to HIV and AIDS, which was published by Hart Publishing in November 2008. Other articles in this area have appeared in the International Journal of STD and AIDS, the Journal of Medical Ethics and the Juridical Review.

(4) Other areas of Scots law. He formerly taught both trusts and (more briefly) delict while at Aberdeen, and has published in both these areas, as well as on the question of Scottish appeals to the House of Lords, Judicial Committee of the Privy Council and the new Supreme Court. In addition to a handful of short articles and textbook chapters, a casebook, Trusts: Cases and Materials was published in 2002, and he has contributed essays to KGC Reid, Zimmermann and de Waal (eds), Exploring the Law of Succession (2007) and E Reid and Palmer, Mixed Jurisdictions Compared: Private Law in Louisiana and Scotland (2009). He also contributed the chapter on remedies to the new Scottish Universities Law Institute work on Delict, which was published in 2007.

He is (since 2008) a member of the Criminal Courts Rules Council. He is also the honorary president of the School's Mooting Society, acting as a link between the Society and the School. This reflects a longstanding interest in mooting: as a student, he was a member of the Aberdeen team which won the ESU Mooting Competition in 1998 and the Tulane team which finished runners-up in the oral argument stages of the Willem C Vis International Commercial Arbitration Moot in 1999.