Ashlee Beazley is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie (MSCA) Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Luxembourg and a Research Associate at KU Leuven. Prior to joining Uni.lu, she was a Postdoctoral Research Associate, Teaching Assistant and Assistant Project Coordinator at the Faculty of Law and Criminology, KU Leuven, where she assisted in the coordination of a number of European Commission-funded consortium projects, including DigiRights (Digitialisation of Defence Rights in Criminal Proceedings). A former legal editor, Ashlee holds a PhD from the KU Leuven in Comparative Criminal Law and Procedure, a Master of Studies from the University of Oxford in British and European History, and conjoint Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Laws (with Honours) degrees from the University of Auckland. Her research interests include comparative criminal procedure, defence and fair trial rights, and legal history; at heart, she is an interdisciplinary and comparative scholar.
Ashlee’s current MSCA-funded research project explores the application of Critical Race and Intersectional Theories (CRIT) to procedural defence rights in criminal proceedings. With this project (which began in November 2025), she aims to undertake a comparative and interdisciplinary study of hidden biases and veiled discrimination in criminal justice across four European jurisdictions (Belgium, France, Ireland and Luxembourg), through the lens of CRIT. While at the CSLS, Ashlee will work on the foundational study for this project: she will explore the development of critical race and intersectional theories, and their application to criminal justice procedures in the United States, especially as applied to the right to a fair trial.
Alongside her MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowship, Ashlee is also working on a monograph of her PhD thesis. Poor Defence Lawyering and Ineffective Defence Assistance: A Comparative Study of the Quality of Criminal Defence Representation will be published with Hart (Bloomsbury Academic) in late 2026.
