Staff Profile
Dr Kara Woodbury-Smith, BA, MA, PhD
Contact Dr Kara Woodbury-Smith (email at kara.m.woodbury-smith@durham.ac.uk)
Kara joined Durham Law School in September 2018. A founding member of the recently established Durham Centre for Law and Philosophy, she is serving as Co-Director for the 2020-2021 year.
She has 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), a very recently completed PhD in philosophy with McMaster University, and two young children.
Kara’s doctoral thesis, The Nature of Law and Potential Coercion, is a conceptual analysis of the relationship between law and coercion and was supervised by W.J. Waluchow. Her philosophical interests are varied, but she tends to actually write about the nature of coercion, how coercion and law conceptually relate, and how they should come together in legal practice.
Research Interests
- Ethics (meta and normative)
- Legal Philosophy
- Philosophy of constitutional law
- Philosophy of human rights law
- Philosophy of international law
Selected Publications
Chapter in book
- Woodbury-Smith, Kara (2018). Inclusive Legal Positivism. In Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy. 1.
Journal Article
- Woodbury-Smith, Kara (2020). The Nature of Law and Potential Coercion. Ratio Juris 33(2): 223-240.