Erandin Jayasooriya
Postgraduate researcher & Graduate Teaching Fellow.
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 Professor André Klip, examined whether contemporary regulation of professional boxing and its offshoots is reconcilable with the principles that underpin the sport's legality in England and Wales, with a focus on the criminal law's doctrine of consent.
Erandin has held research positions in both engineering and law. Prior to coming to Liverpool, he was the Research Officer of Justice Sampath Wijeratne of the Court of Appeal of Sri Lanka. He commenced his doctoral research at the School of Law and Social Justice in February 2022. Erandin currently teaches Criminal Law (LAW 107/207) and has previously taught Law of the European Union (LAW 210/310). He has been an examiner on those 2 modules, as well as on Legal System in Practice (LAW 002). In 2024, he was lecturer by invitation on Criminal Law, where he taught the theory of accessorial liability.
Since 2023, Erandin has also been a resource person on the Law School’s Widening Participation and Student Outreach programmes, 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.
Erandin’s studies have been funded through all 3 levels of tertiary education. He has held Maastricht University’s High-Potential Scholarship and the Dutch government’s Holland Scholarship. He is currently funded through a Graduate Teaching Fellowship (2022-2025) by the School of Law, and also holds the Modern Law Review Scholarship (2024-2025). Erandin is a member of the Socio-Legal Studies Association. He was PGR Representative of the School of Law (2023-2024).
Research
Erandin’s research interests span the fields of criminology, criminal justice, criminal law, and constitutional law. The foundation for his PhD thesis was laid over many years of studying the nature of punishment and forgiveness, inspired by such random experiences as his first time watching Les Misérables, when he came across the character of Javert: the unyielding inspector who is incapable of mercy. These experiences would lead him to question the role of empathy, temperance, forgiveness, and redemption in the criminal justice process, thus forming the philosophical basis of his doctoral research.
Erandin’s 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. His 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 is a postgraduate member of the Liverpool Public Law Unit. He is also currently assisting in a joint research project by the Law School and the Department of Computer Science, which seeks 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.
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)