Professor of Law

• Child Law, 
• Family Law,
• Human Reproduction and the Law, 
• Juvenile Justice Seminar, 
• Contemporary Issues in Family Law

1978 LL.B (First Class Honors), University of Glasgow, Scotland
1985 LL.M., University of British Columbia, Canada

Professor Sutherland began her career in academia at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1980, subsequently moving to the University of Glasgow. In 2006, she took up her current appointment as Professor of Child and Family Law in the Law School at the University of Stirling. Her relationship with Lewis and Clark Law School began in 1984 and, since 1999, she has spent six months of the year (July thru December) teaching, researching and writing here, returning to the University of Stirling to do much the same there for the other half of the year.

Her primary interests are in the areas of child and family law and most of her publications are in these fields (please see also bibliography). Her latest publication, LAW MAKING AND THE SCOTTISH PARLIAMENT: THE EARLY YEARS (2011), co-edited with three colleagues at Stirling Law School, offers critical analysis of the legislative efforts of the newly-devolved Scottish Parliament during its first decade.  She is currently editing THE FUTURE OF CHILD AND FAMILY LAW: INTERNATIONAL PREDICTIONS, a 16 chapter comparative analysis of the imperatives driving family law forward in a cross-section of countries around the world. Her more long term interest lies in comparing the impact of the European Convention on Human Rights and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, on child and family law, in general, and children’s rights, in particular, with that of the U.S. Constitution, the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, in these areas.

Sutherland is consulted regularly by government agencies, non-governmental organizations and the media, in Scotland, on child and family law and reform thereof, and attends, and presents papers at, national and international conferences. She regards academic life as offering the best of all worlds – opportunities to teach, research, write and travel.