Professor Gillian Black

Gillian Black is Chair of Scots Private Law, with teaching and research interests in family law, particularly adult relationships, parent/child relationships, and heraldry.  She also researches contract law, and privacy and data protection.  Before joining Edinburgh Law School as a Lecturer in 2005, Gillian qualified as a solicitor with Shepherd & Wedderburn in Edinburgh, working in their Commercial Contracts division, and then spent 18 months as a teaching assistant in the School of Law at the University of Glasgow.  She completed her PhD on publicity rights in Scots law part-time between 2005-2009.

Gillian’s work to date has focused on two strands:  personality rights, through privacy and publicity rights; and contract law.  Her publications include Publicity Rights and Image: Exploitation and Legal Control (Hart, 2011), arising from her PhD; the first Scots law title on Data Protection for the Stair Memorial Encyclopedia; and the latest edition of Woolman on Contract.  She is now building on this work in the field of relationships and family law, firstly through an exploration of privacy and personality within families, and secondly, the use of contracts to regulate aspects of family relationships, including pre-nuptial agreements and financial provision on separation.