Faculty of Computing, Law and Psychology | School of Law

Dr Jessica Walsh

Lecturer in Law

Contact me

Lawyering Skills and Competitions Lead

LLB in European Law (Warwick), European Certificate of Integrated Legal Studies (Warwick, Lille, Saarland), PhD (Surrey), GCLT in HE (Surrey), Solicitor (non-practising).

Portrait of Dr Jessica Walsh, Lecturer in Law at The University of Buckingham

Teaching and coaching

Dr Walsh leads the Legal Skills and Procedure module that introduces undergraduate law students to the role of an advocate in a dispute resolution setting, and coaches them on the skills required to effectively protect a client’s interests in both a negotiation and a courtroom setting. She also teaches contract law.

As the Lawyering Skills and Competitions Lead at the Law School, Dr Walsh provides coaching to students competing in national skills-based competitions. In 2022-23, teams coached by Dr Walsh succeeded in reaching the semi-finals (Round 4) of the OUP & ICCA National Mooting Competition and scoring the highest (out of 62 teams) in the regional rounds of the CEDR Student Negotiation Competition.

She is a Fellow of Advance HE and has led undergraduate and postgraduate modules on a wide variety of subjects including competition law, European Union law, and international human rights. She previously taught at the University of Surrey and the University of Winchester.

Professional Experience

Dr Walsh qualified as a Solicitor in 2012, having trained at DAC Beachcroft LLP in London and Balaguer, Morera & Asociados in Barcelona. Her work in practice focused on international financial and commercial dispute resolution and corporate law. She has provided research assistance to the authors of a leading practitioner’s guide to the Arbitration Act and retains an active interest in arbitration and ADR.

Research

Dr Walsh’s research focuses on judicial independence and accountability, having conducted extensive empirical research on processes for the removal of judges for malperformance in Argentina for her doctoral studies. In particular, her research evaluates the efficiency of judicial councils in protecting and advancing both judicial independence and accountability within contexts of political polarisation and mistrust of institutions. She has consulted with the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law and the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute on judicial independence and accountability in Latin America.

Broader research interests include courts and dispute resolution, corruption and informality, accountability, and the interaction between institutionalisation and autonomy. Dr Walsh’s research continues to draw on her interest in comparative law and socio-legal research methodology. She is a graduate of the trilateral and trilingual Integrated Common Programme run jointly by the Universities of Warwick, Lille II (France), and Saarland (Germany), which specialised in comparative European commercial law. She also holds an LLB in European Law from Warwick University.

Supervision

Dr Walsh is interested in supervising research projects on corruption, accountability, dispute resolution, judicial management, and impeachment proceedings, in particular those proposing to adopt comparative or empirical methodologies.

Languages

Dr Walsh is fluent in Spanish, French, and German, and has undertaken many legal, academic, and other translations on a freelance basis. This includes having translated a large portion of a book on children’s rights from a cross-cultural perspective. She is currently learning Bulgarian.

<< Back to the directory