Dr Peter Slinn

Peter Slinn was educated at Oxford (MA) and London (PhD) Universities and qualified as a solicitor (England and Wales) in 1967, when he began his career as a legal adviser in the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

Subsequently, he entered academia, teaching international, constitutional and natural resources law at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. He was Head of the Law Department at SOAS (1990-1994), and after retirement from full-time teaching, was Director of the SOAS MA in International Studies and Diplomacy at CISD until 2007.

Currently, he is Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame (London Law Centre), and joint General Editor of the Law Reports of the Commonwealth, (Butterworths LexisNexis) the 100th volume of which was published in 2009. He is Vice-President of the Commonwealth Legal Education Association, Chair of the Editorial Board of the Commonwealth Judicial Journal and a member of the executive committee of the Commonwealth Lawyers Association.

Outside academia, since the end of the last century he has been involved closely with the drafting and promotion of the Commonwealth Principles on the Relationship between the Three Branches of Government on which topic he has presented papers at the Commonwealth Law Conferences in London, Melbourne, Hong Kong and Hyderabad . He has acted as consultant on constitutional affairs to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Commonwealth Secretariat. In 2003, Law and Development: Facing Complexity in the 21st Century, Essays in Honour of Peter Slinn (Hatchard and Perry-Kessaris eds.) were published in acknowledgement of his scholarly contribution in that field. In 1988, he was appointed Officier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Academiques for service to Anglo-French co-operation in the field of the international law of development.

His hobbies include watching cricket, playing golf (badly) and painting (very badly).

Recent Publications

• (with John Hatchard and Muna Ndulo) 'Comparative Constitutionalism and Good Governance the Commonwealth: an Eastern and Southern Africa Perspective', Cambridge University Press (2004)
• 'Law and the Commonwealth' in J Mayall (ed) 'The Contemporary Commonwealth: An Assessment 1965-2009', Routledge (2010)
• 'The Commonwealth:What does the Commonwealth mean to Lawyers?’ paper presented to the  Commonwealth Lawyer Conference in Cape Town, April, 2013 and published in the Commonwealth Lawyer, vol 22,2, 2013.