Professor Fiona de Londras

• BCL (NUI)
• LLM (NUI)
• PhD (NUI)

Fiona de Londras joined Birmingham Law School as the inaugural Chair in Global Legal Studies in the summer of 2015, having previously worked at Durham University, University College Dublin, and University College Cork. From 2019-2022 she is Honorary Professor at the Australian National University, College of Law. In 2020 she was appointed to the Law Sub-Panel for REF2021. She undertakes human rights consultancy work for politicians, government departments, and large international institutions. 

Fiona’s research and teaching interests are broadly in the fields of human rights and comparative constitutional law, focusing on counter-terrorism, reproductive rights (especially abortion law), and the development and domestic impacts of the European Convention on Human Rights. Her work has been funded by the European Commission, the British Academy, the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, and the Leverhulme Trust. In 2017 she was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize in law, awarded to recognise the achievement of outstanding researchers whose work has already attracted international recognition and whose future career is exceptionally promising. This Prize is supporting her research agenda from November 2018-2023.

Professor de Londras is editor of the Human Rights Law Review (OUP) and former editor of Legal Studies and the Irish Yearbook of International Law. She is a member of the Executive Committee and EDI Committee of the Society of Legal Studies, the AHRC Peer Review and Strategic colleges.  

Due to her Philip Leverhulme Prize Professor de Londras is not currently engaged in undergraduate or postgraduate teaching in the School. However, students who wish to discuss her or their research are invited to visit her (Room 146) and/or to contact her by email.

Professor de Londras currently supervises students working on (national, comparative, and international) public law and on topics as diverse as the conceptualisation of security in law, the future of the ECtHR, postcoloniality and nationality law, migrants' rights, and the regulation of abortion information. Her former doctoral students now hold academic posts at leading law schools around the world, in practice, and in regulatory and policy bodies. She has a strong track record of supporting doctoral students in securing funding from the AHRC, Irish Research Council, and the NUI Travelling Studentship fund as well as their own national governments and the University of Birmingham.

At this time a substantial number of Professor de Londras' students are completing their doctoral work and she has capacity to welcome new doctoral candidates in the 2022-23 academic year. She would be pleased to hear from exceptional students with outline research proposals who are interested in undertaking work on:

The European Court of Human Rights
Counter-terrorism/security, transnationalism, and human rights
Comparative constitutional law
Abortion law reform

Find out more - our PhD Law  page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

Professor de Londras’ work is fundamentally concerned with the role, impact and operation of constitutionalism and rights in 'complex' policy areas (i.e. areas in respect of which there are no 'right answers'). In exploring these matters, her work concentrates broadly on terrorism/security and the law, (comparative) constitutional law, human rights law, and gender and the law. Inevitably these themes sometimes overlap; much of her work on human rights law for example has taken place in, or develops further the work that Professor de Londras has done in the security/counter-terrorism context. 

Prof. de Londras’ work strives to consider law in context, sometimes incorporating empirical work including interviews, focus groups, and thematic analysis of large corpora (e.g. parliamentary debates). Professor de Londras’ research work has been funded by the European Commission FP7 fund, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust, the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, and the World Health Organization. In 2017 Professor de Londras was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize in Law, which is supporting her full-time research agenda from November 2018-2021.