Faculty of Law

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

Professor Kerr earned her JD at the University of British Columbia. She 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. Professor Kerr 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. 

Sharry Aiken is an assistant professor in the faculty of law at Queen's University. She is the editor in chief of Refuge, Canada's Periodical on Refugees and is a past president of the Canadian Council for Refugees. In 2006 she represented a coalition of public interest groups, including the Canadian Council for Refugees and the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group, in an intervention before the Supreme Court of Canada in the cases of Charkaoui, Harkat and Almrei. Relevant publications include “Manufacturing ‘Terrorists’: Refugees, National Security and Canadian Law” (2000); “Of Gods and Monsters: National Security and Canadian Refugee Policy”, (2001); “Risking Rights: An Assessment of Canadian Border Security Policies” (2007); “From Slavery to Expulsion: Racism, Canadian Immigration Law and the Unfulfilled Promise of Modern Constitutionalism” (2007); and “National Security and Canadian Immigration: Deconstructing the Discourse of Trade-Offs” (forthcoming 2008). In 2007 she was awarded a SSHRC standard research grant for her project, Refugee Diasporas,“Homeland” Conflicts and the Impact of the Post-9/11 Security Paradigm.

Arthur Cockfield, HBA (University of Western Ontario), LL.B (Queen’s University), JSM and JSD (Stanford University), is an Associate Professor at Queen’s University Faculty of Law where he was appointed as a Queen’s National Scholar. Prior to joining Queen’s, he worked as a lawyer in Toronto and as a law professor in San Diego. He has been a visiting scholar at the University of Texas and is a senior research fellow at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Professor Cockfield has authored, co-authored or edited nine books and over forty academic articles and book chapters that focus on tax law as well as law and technology theory and privacy law. He is the recipient of a number of fellowships and external research grants for this research, including four grants from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council, an American Tax Policy Institute grant, the Charles D. Gonthier research fellowship for privacy law research, and two publication grants from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences. His writings have been translated into over twenty languages (mainly through his work as an author and editor for UNESCO) and have been published in North America, Asia, Europe and Australia.