Welcoming Lisa Kerr to Robson Crim

The holidays have come early this year for Robson Crim. It is wonderful to welcome another great collaborator to the Robson Crim team. We have been expanding our capacity to offer blawgs and to conduct rigorous peer review for our annual criminal law journal. As we near the due date for submission to our second edition, we are proud to welcome Professor Lisa Kerr to the collaborator team.

Lisa Kerr is an Assistant Professor at Queen’s Law where she teaches courses on criminal law, sentencing and prison law.

She earned her JD at the University of British Columbia, clerked with the BC Court of Appeal and was an associate at Fasken Martineau. She also served as staff lawyer at Prisoners’ Legal Services, Canada’s only dedicated legal aid office for prisoners. Lisa obtained an LLM and a JSD at New York University, where she was named a Trudeau Scholar. Her research focuses on punishment theory, the comparative study of criminal law and prisoner rights, and the relationship between sentencing and prison conditions. She has published a number of papers and opinion pieces in law journals and newspapers on these topics.

Professor Kerr is preoccupied with the concept of litigation as an instrument of social change, and she engages extensively in pro bono litigation work. For several years, she has worked with Pivot Legal Society on a campaign to decriminalize sex work. She has worked on multiple cases with the B.C. Civil Liberties Association and with the John Howard Society of Canada in efforts to abolish solitary confinement in Canadian prisons.