Professor Fiona de Londras

• BCL (NUI)
• LLM (NUI)
• PhD (NUI)

I joined Birmingham Law School in 2015 as the inaugural Professor of Global Legal Studies. Since joining Birmingham, I have been Deputy Head of School (2016-2018) and Deputy Director of Research for the College of Arts and Law (2022-), as well as undertaking research funded by the British Academy, the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the Leverhulme Trust. I am an Honorary Professor at the Australian National University College of Law (2019-2025), and hold visiting positions at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy (University of Toronto) and Oxford Human Rights Hub (University of Oxford). In 2020 I was appointed an as a member of the law sub-panel for REF 2021 (outputs assessor). In 2017 I won the Philip Leverhulme Prize in Law.

My work is broadly concerned with whether, and if so how, rights shape law- and policymaking in contentious (or ‘hard’) policy areas. I usually adopt a socio-legal approach in my research, often combined with comparative and/or transnational approaches. While my earlier work was predominantly concerned with counterterrorism, I now focus mostly on researching abortion with a particular concentration on the integration of rights and rights-discourses in law and policy debates on the regulation of abortion. Complementing my scholarly work, I undertake commissioned research and policy work for politicians, government departments, and international organisations, and regularly appear in national and international media.

I am now editor of the Human Rights Law Review (OUP) and previously edited Legal Studies and the Irish Yearbook of International Law. I am a member of the Executive Committee and EDI Committee of the Society of Legal Scholars, and of the AHRC peer review college.

Before joining Birmingham, I was a professor of law in Durham, and prior to that I held posts as a lecturer in University College Dublin and University College Cork. At that time, my research was funded by the European Commission and National University of Ireland.

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 some capacity to welcome new doctoral candidates in the 2023-24 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).