Dr Isla Callander

Biography

Isla was appointed as a Lecturer in the School of Law in August 2017. She currently serves as the Strategic Activity Lead for Research Funding for the Centre for Scots Law, and as the School of Law representative on the University's Quality Assurance Committee. 

Isla's expertise and research interests lie in criminal law, justice, evidence and procedure. Along with Professor Margaret Ross and Professor James Chalmers, Isla is a co-author of the fifth edition of Walker and Walker: The Law of Evidence in Scotland (Bloomsbury, 2020). Her research work has been published in a number of academic journals, and she has been a principal or co-investigator on a number of funded research projects, including by the Scottish Universities Law Institute, Clark Foundation for Legal Education and European Commission. She previously contributed to the Scottish Feminist Judgments Project, as the academic commentator on the re-written judgment in Smith v Lees. Isla is interested in comparative research, and has been a visiting scholar at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto (2018) and a visiting researcher at the University of Queensland (2015). Isla is an Associate Researcher of the Scottish Centre for Crime & Justice Research.

In 2021, Isla was appointed to the Board of Examiners for the Law Society of Scotland. She is also a member of the Criminal Law Committee of the Law Society of Scotland.

Isla coordinates and/or teaches upon several courses relating to criminal law, justice, and evidence at both undergraduate and postgraduate level. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Research Overview

Isla's expertise and research interests lie in criminal law, criminal justice, criminal evidence and criminal procedure, with a particular focus upon sexual offences, youth justice, and criminal appeals and post conviction review schemes.

She would be interested in supervising research students working in any of these areas.

Collaborations

Along with principal investigator Dr Katarina Trimmings, Isla is a co-investigator on a major collaborative project titled 'Protection of Abducting Mothers in Return Proceedings: Intersection between Domestic Violence and Parental Child Abduction' (POAM Project). This project is funded by the European Union’s Rights, Equality and Citizenship Programme (2014-2020).

Teaching Responsibilities

In 2021-2022, Isla is coordinating and/or teaching on the following courses:

LS3025 Evidence (course coordinator)

LS/LX4019 Criminal Justice Honours (course coordinator)

LS5096 Issues in Criminal Justice LLM 

LS/LX452K Children, Young People and Crime (course coordinator) 

Isla has previously coordinated and/or taught on the following courses:

LS1020 Criminal Law

LS/LX451V Criminal Evidence Honours

LS551R Criminal Evidence and Proof LLM

LS/LX401E Gender, Law and Society Honours

LS1527 English Criminal Law  

LS501T/LS551T Critical Legal Thinking and Scholarship (on campus)

LS502V/LS552X Critical Legal Thinking and Scholarship (online)

LS2526 Family Law

LS2533 Business Law