Inaugural Lecture of Professor Kasey McCall-Smith

Edinburgh Law School presents the Inaugural Lecture of Professor Kasey McCall-Smith

 

About the Speaker

Professor McCall-Smith holds the Chair of International Law and Human Rights and is programme director for the LLM in Human Rights. She joined the Law School on a permanent basis in 2014. She is a US qualified lawyer and holds a BA and a Juris Doctor from the University of Arkansas. She also holds an LLM and PhD from the University of Edinburgh.

She is an active researcher in international human rights law, treaty law and is interested in how different actors contribute to the development of international law, including the role of treaty bodies as generators of law. For several years she has been exploring best practice in relation to incorporating human rights treaties into national law with a focus on how different actors negotiate the vertical relationship between international and national law. Dr McCall-Smith works alongside numerous civil society organisations and channels this practical experience into her teaching and programming on the LLM in Human Rights. She also has carried out extensive research on the issues of torture and fair trial in the US military commissions in Guantanamo and the conditions of detention, including how detention relates to the prohibition against torture.

She is currently the Director of Postgraduate Research at the Law School and the Director of the Global Justice Academy. From 2017-2023 she was the Executive Chair of the Association of Human Rights Institutes (AHRI). Since 2020, she served as a member of the Academic Advisory Panel to the Scottish Government’s Human Rights Task Force and the Expert Advisory Group on UNCRC Incorporation. She is a visiting professor at the University of Arkansas (USA) and KU Leuven (Belgium). Alongside her role as an academic, Dr McCall-Smith acts as a consultant on projects across a range of issues relating to human rights and the law of treaties.