People

Dr Benjamin Lawrence

Dr Benjamin Lawrence
Dr Benjamin Lawrence
Dr Benjamin Lawrence

Lecturer

About
Email Address
benjamin.lawrence@abdn.ac.uk
School/Department
School of Law

Biography

Ben Lawrence joined the University of Aberdeen as Lecturer in Public Law and Anti-SLAPP in 2026, having previously taught at Durham Law School and the School of Oriental and African Studies (London), as well as being a Research Fellow at the Centre for Asian Legal Studies, National University of Singapore. Ben received his Ph.D. in Law and Society from the University of Victoria (Canada) in December 2019. He holds an M.A. in International and Comparative Legal Studies (SOAS), and a B.A. in American History and Politics (University of Leicester). A socio-legal scholar who focuses on constitutions, Ben has a particular interest in  constitutional law in authoritarian and post-conflict contexts, with a regional orientation towards Southeast Asia. Most notably, Ben has written extensively on constitutional practice in Cambodia, with a monograph – titled In the Shadow of the Constitution: the Micropolitics of Constitutional Contestation in Cambodia –published with Cambridge University Press in 2025. Meanwhile, along with Brian Tiojanco (University of Tokyo), Jaclyn Neo (NUS) and Kentaro Matsubara (Tokyo), Ben was also a co-editor of the book Pathways to Constitutional Legitimacy in Asia Pacific (Edward Elgar, 2026). Elsewhere, Ben’s publications have appeared in the Journal of Law and Religion, the Journal of Legal Pluralism and Critical Social Analysis, the Asian Journal of Law and Society, and Contemporary Southeast Asia. Outside of academia, Ben has worked with the Geneva-based conflict-mediation organisation, the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue; the Constitution-Building program of the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance; the Cambodian Development Resource Institute; and the European Union External Action Service.

Internal Memberships

Convenor, Anti-SLAPP Research Hub

Latest Publications

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Research

Research Areas

Law

  • Supervising
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Research Specialisms

  • Public Law
  • Comparative Law
  • Sociology of Law
  • Comparative Politics
  • War and Peace Studies

Our research specialisms are based on the Higher Education Classification of Subjects (HECoS) which is HESA open data, published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence.

Teaching

Programmes

Courses

Publications

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Books and Reports

Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings

Contributions to Journals

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