Personal statement

Katie Boyle is Professor of International Human Rights Law and Social Justice at the University of Strathclyde and previously qualified as a constitutional lawyer with the Government Legal Service for Scotland.

Her research examines the legalisation of human rights, specifically economic, social, cultural and environmental rights, in different constitutional settings. She adopts innovative, interdisciplinary and collaborative methods for cross-sectoral, comparative and international responses to two diverging trajectories in public international law. The first, the "less-than-human" trajectory, examines the mobilisation of valuation discourses to undermine humanity, the socially constructed nature of injustice, and the absence of effective remedies to address it. The second, the "more-than-human" trajectory, engages with multi-species justice, the rights of nature and questions the feasibility of human rights within the rights of nature construct as well as its ability to deliver emerging theories of pluriversal justice.
 
This research trajectory bridges the gap between competing theoretical ambitions and the practical legal frameworks required to deliver accountability for people, species, and the planet. 

Her recent monographs place rights discourse firmly on the path to effective remedies for social injustice. Economic and Social Rights Law (2020) develops principles derived from deliberative democracy theory to address the critiques of social rights adjudication. Access to Social Justice (co-authored 2025) uses empirical research to challenge hegemonic discourse that marginalises social rights to the margins, reclaims social rights as legal rights and reframes social justice as the right to an effective remedy for a violation.

This work has informed processes of constitutional change across the UK and internationally. The research is being implemented as part of Scotland’s incorporation journey of international human rights into domestic law. At the international level her research includes work funded by the British Academy in Colombia and Brazil and her work was translated into Spanish to inform the current Chilean constitutional convention process.

Katie has served as Expert Advisor to NGOs, governments, parliaments, and the United Nations, including advising three UN Special Rapporteurs on access to justice issues. She was appointed to Scotland’s First Minister’s Advisory Group on Human Rights Leadership in Scotland, the Academic Advisory Panel to the National Taskforce on Human Rights Leadership and the Children and Young Person’s Commissioner’s Expert Group on incorporation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in both Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Her work is funded through competitive and independent research grants with the Nuffield Foundation, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Economic and Social Research Council and various national and international human rights institutes, commissions, consortiums and NGO's including the Equality and Human Rights Commission, the Scottish Human Rights Commission, the Northern Ireland Human Rights Consortium and Amnesty International UK.

She is happy to hear from prospective Masters, doctoral and postdoctoral early career researchers about potential supervision or collaboration. She is deeply committed to emancipatory research methods that provide opportunities for early career academics.