Lisa M. Kelly is an Associate Professor at Queen’s University, Faculty of Law, where she teaches criminal law, evidence, criminal procedure, and sexual and reproductive justice. She studied history and political science at the University of British Columbia (B.A) and is a graduate of the University of Toronto, Faculty of Law (J.D.) and Harvard Law School (S.J.D.), where she was a Trudeau Scholar. Kelly’s doctoral dissertation – Governing the Child: Parental Authority, State Power, and the School in North America – analyzed legal struggles over race and school discipline from the late-nineteenth century through the present. Before joining Queen’s, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia Law School and the Center for Reproductive Rights in New York City. She previously served as a law clerk to Justice Marshall E. Rothstein of the Supreme Court of Canada. Kelly has been a Fulbright Scholar, a Frank Knox Memorial Fellow, and a Fellow of the Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School.

In 2018, she received the Stanley M. Corbett Award for Teaching Excellence.\

Research and Service

Kelly’s research lies at the intersection of criminal law and family law with a focus on youth criminal justice and the legal regulation of young people at school and in their communities. She is specifically interested in the ways that the criminal and educational systems shape young people’s lives differentially along lines of race, class, gender, and disability.

From 2018-2023, Kelly was the Principal Investigator of a SSHRC-funded project, “Police Powers in Canadian Public Schools.” She is currently completing a monograph based on this work entitled, Unsafe: How a Politics of Danger Transformed School Life.

Kelly regularly teaches in judicial education programs for the National Judicial Institute and the Canadian Association of Provincial Court Judges on topics including youth criminal justice, the testimonial competency and accommodation of child witnesses, and the treatment of prior statement evidence.

From 2018-2023, she served on the Board of the St. Lawrence Youth Association in Kingston, a non-profit charitable organization primarily funded by the Ministry of Children, Community and Social Services that works with young people in conflict with the law. She currently serves on the Board of the Canadian Criminal Law Quarterly.

Kelly has recently joined as a co-author with Judge Sanjiv Anand and Professor Nicholas Bala on Canada’s leading youth justice textbook, Youth Criminal Justice Law, 3rd ed. (Irwin Law and University of Toronto Press, 2025). 

Selected Publications

For a full list of Professor Kelly's publications, please consult her CV.