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 The City Law School Dr. Corsi serves as the Lead for Disability and Accessibility on the Law School's Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion team. Additional activities include serving on the University's Shadow Leadership Board, which provides input on University policies, and serving as an Advisory Board Member for City's Gender Equality and Law Project, connecting City law students with law students in Indonesia.

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 serving as Co-Founder of the Working Group on Gender Parity for the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and related research outputs regarding changing the over representation of one gender on the International Court of Justice; serving as first author for two linked novel narrative systematic reviews on the gendered dimensions of homicide defences globally; and developing a novel research framework for conducting evidence synthesis on legal materials.

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 2023 and 2024 she was awarded Higher Education Innovation Funds (HEIF) for her work to achieve judicial gender parity at the International Court of Justice. In 2023, she was awarded Policy Support Fund funding for her research on gender bias in homicide defences. 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 done work 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.

2^ndsupervisor

• Muhammad Tanvir Hashem Munim, Research Student

Featured publications

1. Corsi, J.L. (2022). Structural Violence as a Driver of Interpersonal Violence against Children. (pp. 187-206). The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group. ISBN 9781793618375.
2. 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

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3. Corsi, J. (2018). An Argument for Strict Legality in International Criminal Law. Georgetown Journal of International Law, 49(4), pp. 1321-1381

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4. 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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5. 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.

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