Dr Jessica Corsi

Overview

Dr. Jessica Lynn Corsi is a Senior Lecturer in Law at the City Law School and a founding faculty member at City's interdisciplinary Violence and Society Centre.

At the Centre, she is a Co-Investigator on VISION, a 5 year £7.1 million multi-institution consortium grant from the UKPRP. VISION is a partnership between City, University of London, King's College London, University College London, Lancaster University, University of Bristol, Warwick University, and Public Health Wales. VISION focuses on how improving measurement and data can contribute to reducing violence and health inequalities in society and support the recovery of victims of violence.

At City Law School Dr. Corsi serves as the Lead for Disability and Accessibility on the Law School's Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion team and is an Advisory Board member for City's interdisciplinary Centre for Law and Criminal Justice Research.

Dr. Corsi's work focuses on how the law can prevent and alleviate violence and foster substantive and transformative equality. Her approach spans public international, regional, domestic, and comparative law, and combines theory, data, traditional legal research methods, and interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary research methods from the social sciences and the sciences.

Her current research projects include a novel narrative systematic review on the gendered dimensions of homicide defences globally and an exploration of the human right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment.

Dr. Corsi holds a PhD in Law from Cambridge University, a Juris Doctorate from Harvard Law School, an LL.M. from Cambridge University, and a B.S.F.S. from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. Her doctoral thesis was entitled Creating the Crimes of Rape and Sexual Violence Under International Criminal Law: Lessons in Legality.

Her monograph drawn from the doctoral thesis, Legality and the Doctrine of Sources in the Creation of International Criminal Law: Rape and other Sexual Crimes, will be published by Cambridge University Press.

Dr. Corsi has previously taught law and related topics for Brunel University London, NYU Law Paris, St. George’s, University of London, and more.

In 2018, she was awarded two small grants on violence from the British Academy addressing hate crimes against migrants and violence against children, and a Brunel Research Initiative Enterprise Fund for her work on sexual harassment as violence.

Dr. Corsi has worked for the United Nations, Human Rights Watch, the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and other organisations on topics such as indicators of safety and violence; the rule of law; governance; legal empowerment of the poor; and human rights broadly speaking. Her work has included contributing to the drafting and implementation of several international treaties and bilateral agreements; fact finding missions and the drafting of public reports; and advising governments and organisations on a range of legal and related issues.

Dr. Corsi's research interests include public international law, human rights law, international criminal law, jurisprudence, gender, criminal law, and violence in many forms, including hate crimes, armed conflict, violence against children, gender-based violence, violence against animals, and more.

Featured publications

1. Corsi, J. Structural Violence as a Driver of Interpersonal Violence Against Children: England & Wales and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. In Breger, M. (Ed.), Comparative Family Law Research Handbook Lexington.
2. Corsi, J. ‘“Managing Violence”: Can the International Criminal Court prevent sexual violence in conflict?’ in The First Global Prosecutor, eds. Minow et al, Michigan University Press, April 2015.
3. Corsi, J.L. (2021). Legal justifications for gender parity on the bench of the International Court of Justice: An argument for evolutive interpretation of Article 9 of the ICJ Statute. Leiden Journal of International Law, 34(4), pp. 977–1000. doi:10.1017/s0922156521000443.

   [publisher’s website]

4. Corsi, J. (2018). An Argument for Strict Legality in International Criminal Law. Georgetown Journal of International Law, 49(4), pp. 1321–1381.
5. Corsi, J. and Birchfield, L. (2010). Between Starvation and Globalization: The Right to Food in India. Michigan Journal of International Law, 31(4).

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