Erandin Jayasooriya

Postgraduate Research Student and University Teacher / Examiner of Criminal Evidence.

Liverpool Law School

Erandin.Jayasooriya@liverpool.ac.uk

Biography

Following undergraduate studies in law (University of London) and engineering (University of Moratuwa), Erandin was awarded his LLM in Forensics, Criminology and Law cum laude by Maastricht University. His master's thesis, supervised by Prof. André Klip, examined the legitimacy of professional boxing and its offshoots in England and Wales, in terms of their place in the criminal law’s doctrine of consent.

Prior to coming to Liverpool, Erandin was the Research Officer of Justice Sampath Wijeratne of the Court of Appeal of Sri Lanka (now of the Supreme Court). He commenced his doctoral research in February 2022, and alongside it, has taught on Criminal Law and Law of the European Union. He has examined students on those 2 modules, as well as on Legal System in Practice. He has also delivered lectures on invitation in Criminal Law (accessorial liability) and Sports Law (legality of boxing). Erandin currently teaches and examines on Criminal Evidence. He has been granted Associate Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy.

In terms of administrative work, Erandin has served as a resource person on the Law School’s Widening Participation and Student Outreach programmes since 2023, where he shares his research/teaching interests with schoolchildren of all backgrounds. In this role, he delivers interactive presentations and lectures with a view to stimulating their enthusiasm for the study of law and criminology at university level. He has also served as PGR Representative of the School of Law (2023/24).

Erandin’s studies have been funded at all 3 levels of tertiary education. He is a sometime High-Potential Scholar (Maastricht University), Holland Scholar (Government of the Netherlands), and Graduate Teaching Fellow (University of Liverpool). He currently holds the Modern Law Review Scholarship.

Erandin is a member of the Society of Legal Scholars, the Socio-Legal Studies Association, the Liverpool Public Law Unit, and the (Liverpool) Criminal Justice Unit.

Research

Erandin’s research interests span the fields of criminology, criminal justice, criminal law, and constitutional law. The philosophical foundation for his PhD project was laid over many years of studying the nature of punishment and mercy, which lead him to question the role of empathy, temperance, forgiveness, and redemption in the criminal justice process. His doctoral thesis aims to determine the features that give rise to a legitimacy deficit in the exercise of the presidential pardon power in Sri Lanka, and to propose a framework of substantive and procedural reforms designed to address that deficit.

Erandin’s research method combines doctrinal, empirical, comparative, and normative perspectives. The doctrinal perspective is used to establish the legal framework which governs presidential pardoning in theory, before the empirical perspective is used to determine how that framework operates in practice. The comparative perspective is then used to gain insights for reform through the study of the royal prerogative of mercy as it operates in England & Wales, and the federal pardon power in the USA. Finally, the normative perspective is used to propose and defend comprehensive reforms to the present system of pardoning in Sri Lanka, using the law-in-context lenses of history, political science, psychology, sociology, and penology.

In addition to his doctoral research, Erandin has assisted in a joint research project by the Law School and the Department of Computer Science (under the supervision of Dr. Jack Mumford), which sought to develop precedent models for chosen articles of the ECHR, that could effectively predict and explain case outcomes before the European Court of Human Rights.

Erandin has presented his research findings at the SLSA Conference (2024 & 2025), the UK Constitutional Law Association’s ECR Workshop (2025), the School of Law and Social Justice’s Criminal Justice Unit (2025), as part of the Law School’s Work-in-Progress seminar series (2023), and at the annual internal PGR Conference (2022-2025). In September 2025, he will present a paper on the demise of the free pardon in England & Wales, at the SLS Conference in Leeds.

Working thesis title

Justice, pragmatism, and favour: reforming presidential pardoning in Sri Lanka.

Dates of study

Commencement: February 2022
Expected defence: January 2026

Supervisors

• Professor Michael Gordon (Liverpool)
• Dr Laurène Soubise (Leeds)