Dr Elizabeth O’Loughlin is Associate Professor in Public Law and Human Rights at Durham Law School, where she joined as an Assistant Professor in 2019. She has previously worked at City University, the University of Sheffield, and the University of Leeds. She has held visiting positions at Melbourne Law School, where she was a Kathleen Fitzpatrick Visiting Fellow in Comparative Constitutional Law, and at the Kenya Section of the International Commission of Jurists in Nairobi. She holds a PhD from the University of Manchester, where she worked on a European Research Council-funded study entitled ‘A Sociology of the Transnational Constitution’. She also holds an LLM (by research) from the European University Institute and an LLB from the University of Leeds.

At Durham, Elizabeth teaches on public law and human rights modules across the undergraduate and postgraduate taught programmes. She served as co-director of the Human Rights Centre between 2019-2021 and was Director of Undergraduate Admissions in 2020-2021. She was co-convenor of the Public Law Section of the Society of Legal Scholars from 2021-2024.

Elizabeth is a public lawyer who researches in the fields of comparative constitutional law and administrative law. Her administrative law work employs empirical approaches to the understanding of judicial review, with a growing emphasis on studying trends in judicial review procedure. She actively engages in the judicial reform landscape in the UK and is called upon for her expertise by both government and the charity sector. For instance, She has delivered training on designing legal content analysis studies to the Research Team of the Public Law Project, and submitted evidence to the Ministry of Justice call for evidence on suggested reforms to judicial review of Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects. An example of her mixed-methods approach to the study of judicial review can be found in her Nuffield Foundation-funded project: Transparency and Judicial Review: An empirical Study of the Duty of Candour .