July 2015 will see new faculty members arriving at Queen’s Law; part of an ongoing commitment by the Faculty to expand its research and teaching capacities. One of them, Lisa Kerr, is a growing authority on prison law.

Professor Kerr, formerly a Trudeau Scholar and an SSHRC Doctoral Fellow, holds a JSD and LLM from New York University, a LLB from the University of British Columbia and a BA from Simon Fraser University.

Her recently completed doctoral research draws on constitutional law, sentencing, and the philosophy and sociology of punishment. The dissertation focused on a comparative US-Canada examination of the ways that legal systems address prison conditions from sentencing through to judicial review.

Professionally, Kerr clerked for the British Columbia Court of Appeal before joining Fasken Martineau Dumoulin as an associate in the firm’s Vancouver office. She was then the Staff Lawyer for the West Coast Prison Justice Society prior to starting her master’s work at New York University.

She will continue to work on strategic law reform – ranging from sentencing and prison conditions to sex work decriminalization and rights – with organizations such as Pivot Legal Society, the John Howard Society of Canada, and the B.C. Civil Liberties Association.

Notably, Kerr recently assisted Plaintiff’s counsel who obtained a Supreme Court ruling of public interest standing in the case of Downtown Eastside Sex Workers United Against Violence Society v. Canada (Attorney General).

Her publications include articles in the Canadian Journal of Human Rights, the McGill Law Journal and the Queen’s Law Journal.

Outside of an impressive academic and legal career, Kerr is also an accomplished athlete. She is the five-time Junior World Racquetball Champion as well as the 1997 Elaine Tanner Canadian Junior Female Athlete of the Year.

Kerr will be teaching two courses in the 2015-16 academic year: Criminal Law, and Sentencing and Imprisonment. She is delighted to be returning to Canada this fall and “is excited to be teaching the foundational subject of Criminal Law in the first-year program at Queen's, and to explore the fast-changing fields of sentencing and prison law in my upper-year course.”