Richard Whitecross

Professor of Law, Edinburgh Napier University

Regional Focus: South Asia
Date of Presentation: Session 4, February 25, 2021

Biography:

Dr. Whitecross is the Head of Law and from 1st August 2020, Professor of Law. He is a member of the Business School Core Executive and the University lead for the Professional Doctorate. He is also a member of the University Research Degrees Committee and a number of other University and Business School committees.

A qualified lawyer, Dr. Whitecross is the academic lead on the Scottish Government and Law Society of Scotland Trauma Informed Working Group, a member of the Cross Party Working Group on Male Violence against Women and Girls, and Vice Convener of the Committee of Heads of Law Schools Scotland. He was appointed as a Law Society of Scotland examiner for Scots Private Law and Obligations in 2017. 

Dr. Whitecross has a strong record of research on law, legal practice and access to justice in Scotland, the UK and internationally, and he is experienced in knowledge exchange and building strong research-practitioner relationships. In addition to organizing fifteen conferences, colloquiums and workshops, he has been on the international steering committee for two major conferences on Law and Buddhism. He has delivered invited keynote /plenary presentations at, amongst others, the University of Seville, the Baldy Centre for Law and Society, SUNY (Buffalo) and the St Anthony's College, Oxford. In addition to academic publications and reports, he has written for The Conversation, Policy Forum (Australia), and Asian Survey (Stanford). The BBC, the New York Times and others, have cited his research. 

Dr. Whitecross is a co-investigator in a major Scottish Government funded project examining criminal and civil proceedings involving domestic abuse. This research builds on a series of research studies on child contact, civil proceedings and domestic abuse in Scotland funded by the Royal Society of Edinburgh and Edinburgh Napier University. He is a member of a range of external committees focusing on human rights and gender violence. He has held a number of research awards from the Carnegie Trust, ESRC, Scottish Executive and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He is a member of the ESRC Peer Review College, and a peer reviewer for UKRI and the Carnegie Trust. 

Before Dr. Whitecross became the Head of Law, he was the Learning, Teaching Lead for Accounting, Finance and Law, Programme Leader for the DBA (Home), and lead on the development of the Professional Doctorate. He has been actively involved in doctoral training and in parallel to developing the Professional Doctorate framework for the university he collaborated with Dr. Grainne Barkess (RIE) in the design, development and approval of a new Pg. Cert Researcher Skills. 

Prior to joining Edinburgh Napier University in July 2012, Dr. Whitecross held an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh. He was then a fixed term lecturer in Social Anthropology, before holding an ESRC Research Fellowship in Socio-Legal Studies. As a Senior Researcher in Justice Analytical Services, the Scottish Government he led on a range of civil and criminal research to support policy development and professional practice. His ESRC funded PhD research was a ground breaking ethnography of legal transformation in Bhutan for which he has received the Royal Anthropological Institute Sutasoma Award. Before returning to university, he was a practicing lawyer with commercial experience working in Edinburgh and London.

(This biography has been collected from Edinburgh Napier University)