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Lisa Kelly
2010 Trudeau Scholar
lisa.kelly@trudeaufoundation.net
Current Research
S.J.D. Law, Harvard University
The Innocence and Deviance of the Child at LawBiography
Lisa Kelly is a doctoral candidate (S.J.D.) at Harvard Law School. She specializes in criminal law, family law, and international law. Her doctoral research focuses on the legal regulation of children and adolescents at home, at school, and in detention. Lisa is a Frank Knox Memorial Fellow and a Doctoral Fellow of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Born in Fernie, British Columbia, Lisa earned her B.A. in History and Political Science from the University of British Columbia. Her undergraduate coursework in African-American history, particularly of the antebellum period, sparked her interest in the legal regulation of the household.
Lisa attended law school at the University of Toronto, Faculty of Law where she was a Fellow of the International Programme on Reproductive and Sexual Health Law and Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Law and Equality. Her article, "Bringing International Human Rights Law Home: An Evaluation of Canada's Family Law Treatment of Polygamy" was awarded the Martin L. Friedland and Bill Scadding Essay Prizes by the University of Toronto Faculty of Law Review. Lisa also received the Moritz Bobbert Medal from the University of the Free State, South Africa for her article "Polygyny and HIV/AIDS: A Health and Human Rights Approach."
After graduating, Lisa articled with the Department of Justice in Ottawa and was called to the Law Society of Upper Canada in 2007. She subsequently completed the Master of Laws (LL.M.) program at Harvard, where she studied as a U.S.-Canada Fulbright Scholar. Her Masters thesis analyzed how state sovereignty and national identity projects influence inter-country adoption law and policy among sending and receiving states. In 2008-09, Lisa clerked for Justice Marshall Rothstein of the Supreme Court of Canada.
Lisa plans to pursue an academic career in law teaching. One of her long-term teaching and research goals is to develop thicker understandings of legal governance. She is most interested in examining how areas of law that are traditionally taught in separation - family law, criminal law, and employment law - regularly intersect in reality.Project Description
The Innocence and Deviance of the Child at Law
Contemporary legal thought exhibits a deep ambivalence about the child. Seemingly under threat from an array of online and offline sources, the child is understood as in need of greater legal protection and stricter punishment. Stories of violence committed by and against young people saturate daily media and are at the heart of myriad recent law reforms aimed at protecting the innocent and punishing the deviant. The child is under siege, and is laying siege.
Lisa Kelly's dissertation will examine how this ambivalence manifests itself in contemporary and historical legal understandings of the child. She will examine the legal regulation of children and adolescents at home, at school, and in detention. Her aim in selecting these spaces is to consider how each involves complicated, but under-studied, linkages between the family, the market, and the state. Lisa's dissertation will compare the United States, Canada, and international law where relevant.Trudeau Foundation Themes
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