Page 15 - Magistrates Conference 2019

Celia Blake

Celia Brown-Blake teaches Contract, Trusts and
Corporate Insolvency at the Faculty of Law, The
University of the West Indies, Mona. A qualified
attorney-at-law with a Master of Laws and a PhD in
Linguistics, she specializes in two distinct academic
streams. She is an expert in forensic linguistics, the
study of the confluence of language and the law, as
well as insolvency, corporate law and financial
regulation. In 2017, she was an international visiting
scholar at Stanford Humanities Center, Stanford
University, where she developed and shared her
research on the disenfranchisement of Caribbean vernacular speakers in the legal
system. In 2012, as a Commonwealth Fellow at the London School of Economics, she
examined and published on the nature of judicial oversight of decisions made and
actions taken by financial regulators in the Commonwealth Caribbean. Dr. Blake has
spent the last 15 years developing new research on the impact of linguistic factors on
the administration of justice in contexts involving speakers of Commonwealth
Caribbean vernacular languages and making proposals for reform. A key focus of her
research has been the role language rights play in improving the situation of Caribbean
Creole vernacular speakers in the English-dominant legal system. She was instrumental
in formulating a language rights policy charter which sets out model rights for speakers
of Caribbean Creole languages. In 2019, she received the Principal’s Award for the Best
Research Publication in the Faculty of Law for her recent article, "Supporting Justice
Reform In Jamaica Through Language Policy Change" published in Caribbean Studies.

Dr. Janeille Matthews

Dr. Janeille Zorina Matthews is a criminal justice scholar who
teaches courses in criminal law and criminology at the
University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, whose Faculty of Law
she joined in 2018. She taught at the Mona Campus of The
UWI between 2011 and 2018. Dr. Matthews holds a Juris
Doctor (JD) and Masters in Public Administration from
Harvard University and a PhD in Social Policy from the
London School of Economics and Political Science. Dr.
Matthews is called to the New York State Bar as well as the
Bar of Antigua and Barbuda. She worked as an associate in
the London office of a Wall Street law firm and as a legal intern at the United Nations
International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda based in Arusha, Tanzania. Dr. Matthews is
engaged in ongoing research on the public and political framing of crime in Antigua
and Barbuda. Her doctoral dissertation, analyses Antigua’s crime statistics over a
40year period and interrogates the unconscious assumptions that underlie the country’s
crime policy. Dr. Matthews recently served as the consultant for Antigua and Barbuda
on the first Caribbean Human Development Report published in 2012 subtitled, ‘Human

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