Elspeth Guild is Jean Monnet Professor ad personam at Queen Mary, University of London as well as at the Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands. She is also a partner at the London law firm, Kingsley Napley and an associate senior research fellow at the Centre for European Policy Studies, Brussels. She is also a visiting Professor at the College of Europe, Bruges. She was special advisor to the House of Lords European Union Committee’s Inquiry into Economic Migration in 2005.
Her interests and expertise lies primarily in the area of EU law, in particular EU Justice and Home Affairs (including immigration, asylum, border controls, criminal law and police and judicial cooperation in criminal matters). She also researches EU privacy and data protection law and the nexus with human rights. She co-ordinates the European Commission’s Network of Experts on Free Movement of Workers which the Radboud University manages, bringing together academic experts from the 27 Member States providing national reports annually on the implementation of EU law in the Member States, thematic reports, regional conferences and a national conference each year. She is also co-editor of the European Journal of Migration and Law and Free Movement of Workers (the European Commission’s on-line journal) and on the editorial board of the journal International Political Sociology. She is co-editor of the book series Immigration and Asylum Law and Policy in Europe published by Martinus Nijhoff.
Professor Guild provides regular advice to the European Parliament, the European Commission, the Council of Europe and other European and international organizations (such as the UNHCR) on free movement of persons, migration and asylum. She has researched the legal and social content of European citizenship and has been invited to submit the chapter on EU citizenship for Blackwells Companion for European Union Law and International Law in 2012.
Professor Guild is co-chair of the European Sub Committee, Immigration Law Practitioners Association (ILPA), a post which she has held since the sub-committee was established in 1990. ILPA is the UK legal profession’s voice on immigration and asylum matters with just under a thousand members. In this role she has been instrumental in ensuring that the reflections of UK legal practitioners on EU immigration and asylum matters are taken into account by policy makers both in the UK and the EU. She teaches regularly in ILPA’s continuing education programme. She also teaches regularly for the European Council on Refugees and Exiles in their educational programme for legal practitioners across the Europe.