It’s our great pleasure today to introduce Rebecca Sutton as an IntLawGrrls contributor. Rebecca is a Canadian lawyer and Trudeau Scholar, based at the London School of Economics (LSE). She is currently working on a socio-legal doctoral project that explores how humanitarian and military actors engage with IHL’s principle of distinction when responding to armed conflict. Rebecca is an external researcher on the ERC-funded Individualization of War project at the European University Institute. In 2016 she will join Anne Orford’s ARC-funded Civil War, Intervention, and International Law project at the University of Melbourne as a Kathleen Fitzpatrick Visiting Doctoral Fellow.

Rebecca holds a JD from the University of Toronto and an MSc in Violence, Conflict and Development from SOAS. She was called to the Ontario bar in 2013 after clerking at the Ontario Court of Appeal. Rebecca previously worked in the humanitarian field, serving as Country Director for War Child Canada in Darfur, Sudan from 2009-2011. Her research has been published in the National Journal of Constitutional Law, Criminal Law Quarterly, Citizenship Studies, Refuge, and the Canadian Graduate Journal of Sociology and Criminology. She has trained military, police, and humanitarian actors in IHL and humanitarian action, in venues such as the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre in Accra, Ghana.

Her first post will discuss a training run by the NATO Multi-National CIMIC (civil-military cooperation) Group. Heartfelt welcome!