ELRN Summer Session

Edinburgh Law School’s Empirical Legal Research Network will  be holding a 2-hour event, a summer session showcasing excellent ongoing empirical work from a wide range of legal research. This event takes place on June 29th, 11am – 1pm, in person (!) at the Old College, in Maclaren Stuart room. The session will feature three excellent presentations from three different strands of empirical legal research – from Law School’s Gill Robinson and  Sapna Reheem Shaila, as well as Peace and Conflict Research Evidence Programme’s Roy Gardner. I am sure the excellent presenters are enough to entice you to join the session – though it does not hurt to note that coffee and snacks will be available.

 

Presentations and presenters

 

Gill Robinson - What are we learning from the experiences of young people in custody in Scotland?

Dr Gill Robinson is an Honorary Fellow in the Edinburgh Law School and Professional Advisor on young people in custody with the Scottish Prison Service. Her work draws together evidence and data of different kinds and seeks to communicate findings and implications in ways that are relevant to policymakers and practitioners.
She has a career-long interest in improving the life chances of people who are marginalised and excluded, especially children and young people. Her previous roles spanned academic research, teaching, evaluation, policy development and practice in different contexts including as Chief Inspector in HM Inspectorate of Education and head of the Scottish Government’s Curriculum, Assessment and Qualifications Division for the inceptions of the new school curriculum for Scotland.

 

Roy Gardner - How semantic similarity technology helps us study constitutions and constitutional reform.

Dr Roy Gardner's current research focuses on Natural Language Processing, machine-learning, and data analysis. He is a consultant at the PeaceRep consortium led by Edinburgh Law School, and a researcher at the Comparative Constitutions Project. Roy has a PhD in Neuroscience and, following post-doctoral research, worked in industry. He is a co-founder of a digital services company with an international client base.

 

Sapna Reheem Shaila -  Studying legal transfers and adaptation through empirical methods: a case study of anticorruption reforms in East Timor

Dr Sapna Reheem Shaila is a Research Associate for 'Reversing the Gaze' project at the Law School. Sapna is also a senior teaching fellow at SOAS, University of London. Her research interests are in transnational law, comparative law, sociology of law, and law and development, and she aspires to contribute to theoretical and methodological debates in these areas.