David Kinley holds the Chair in Human Rights Law at the University of Sydney. He is also a barrister at Doughty Street Chambers in London, and serves on the faculty of the Oxford/George Washington University summer program in International Human Rights Law.

Kinley is the author of Necessary Evil: How to Fix Finance by Saving Human Rights (Oxford University Press 2018).

He has held teaching positions at American University, Cambridge University, and the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. He was a Senior Fulbright Scholar in 2004 in Washington D.C., and the Herbert Smith Visiting Fellow at the Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge in 2008. He has held visiting positions at the universities of Edinburgh, Geneva, Pretoria, Queen’s University Belfast, Sciences Po, Paris and the South Pacific (Vanuatu). He has been invited to lecture at leading law schools worldwide.

He has also worked for 15 years as a consultant and adviser on human rights law in Vietnam, Indonesia, South Africa, Thailand, Iraq, Nepal, Laos, China, and Myanmar/Burma, under the auspices of international organizations that include the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the World Bank, and the Ford Foundation. He was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and studied in England in the 1980s at the Universities of Sheffield and Cambridge, where he earned his doctorate.