Staff profile

I joined Durham Law School in September 2018. A founding member of the Durham Centre for Law and Philosophy, I am serving as Co-Director for the 2021-22 year.

I have a BA in Psychology from Hobart and William Smith Colleges (2004), an MA in Ethics and the Philosophy of Theology from King’s College, London (2007), and a PhD in Philosophy from McMaster University (2020) where I studied under the supervision of Wil Waluchow.

Whilst my philosophical interests are varied, I tend to write about general jurisprudence, the nature of coercion, how coercion and law conceptually relate, and how they should come together in legal practice.

• Legal Philosophy
• Ethics (meta and normative)
• Philosophy of international law
• Philosophy of constitutional law
• Philosophy of human rights law

Chapter in book

• Woodbury-Smith, Kara (2018). Inclusive Legal Positivism. In Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy. 1.

Conference Paper

• Woodbury-Smith, K (2020), The Complication with Coercion, Newcastle Law School Seminar Series: Law, Politics, and the Power of Imagination. Newcastle upon Tyne, England.
• Woodbury-Smith, K (2019), Jurisprudence and the Complication with Coercion, Edinburgh Legal Theory Research Group Seminar Series. Edinburgh, Scotland.
• Woodbury-Smith, K (2018), Jurisprudence and the Complication with Coercion, Cambridge Legal Theory Symposium. Cambridge, England.
• Woodbury-Smith, K (2017), Law and Potential Coercion, Edinburgh Legal Theory Research Group Seminar Series. Edinburgh, Scotland.
• Woodbury-Smith, K (2016), Law and Coercion: Comorbidity as a Conceptual Relations Framework, Graduate Students in Law. Ottawa, ON, Canada.
• Woodbury-Smith, K (2016), Law and Coercion:Comorbidity as a Conceptual Relations Framework, Ontario Legal Philosophy Partnership Graduate Conference. Hamilton, ON.
• Woodbury-Smith, K (2016), Law, Coercion, and Conceptual Relations, Cambridge Doctoral Workshop in Legal Theory. Cambridge, England.

Journal Article

• Woodbury-Smith, Kara (2021). On Emad Atiq's Inclusive Anti-positivism. Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 20(2): 211-219.
• Woodbury-Smith, Kara (2020). The Nature of Law and Potential Coercion. Ratio Juris 33(2): 223-240.