Qudsia Mirza is Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of East London and Co-Director of the Centre for Justice, Law and Society. She completed her LLB at the University of East Anglia (awarded Malcolm Hitchcock Memorial Prize), her LLM at the London School of Economics, and her Law Society Final Examinations at the Guildford College of Law. Before turning to academic life, Qudsia qualified as a solicitor with Eversheds Sutherland.

Qudsia has extensive teaching and research experience both in the UK and in the US. She has held visiting and other positions at Birkbeck, University of London, Albany Law School, where she was the Kate Stoneman Professor of Law and Democracy, University of California Berkeley, Washington and Lee University, University of Cincinnati, Harvard Law School, and at Onati International Institute for the Sociology of Law, Spain.

Qudsia has been appointed to executive and advisory positions for various organizations which range from the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants in the UK to the Contemporary Arab and Muslim Cultural Studies Institute, University of North Texas, in the US. Currently, she has been re-elected to a second term to the Executive Committee and also the Policy Council of Liberty, the UK’s leading organisation on human rights policy and campaigning.

Qudsia has published widely in the area of Islamic Law. Her focus is on two main areas: feminist and reformist perspectives of Islamic Law, particularly in the areas of gender and human rights; and legal pluralism and Muslim diasporic communities and the relationship of Islamic legal cultures with official legal systems. Current research projects include the editing of two international collections of essays: Islam, Feminism and Legal Cultures; Law, Religion and Social Progress in Pandemic Times (Routledge), and a research project on the use of expert evidence of Islamic Law in British courts. Qudsia has been the recipient of two British Academy grants.

Qudsia is a member of the Society of Legal Scholars and has been appointed to the editorial boards of a number of journals including Social and Legal Studies, Muslim Journal of Human Rights and is currently on the board of International Journal of Law in Context and the Journal of Contemporary Islam and Muslim Societies.

Qudsia has been active in attending LSA conferences and organising panels and served on the Governance Committee of the Law and Society Association (2019-21).