The Vice Presidents are Officers posted to the Board of the International Institute of Space Law. There are two Vice President positions at IISL.
Lesley-Jane Smith
Term: 2022 - 2025
Professor Dr. Lesley Jane Smith (born 1956) graduated in law from the University of Edinburgh and qualified as a member of the legal profession (Solicitor) in 1981. Prior to relocating to Germany, she first worked in private practice and thereafter for government. Further legal experience came through practice in France (arbitration, international litigation), at EU level (EC Luxembourg) and with a major German law firm. She is now a partner in the law firm Weber-Steinhaus & Smith, Cotton Exchange, Bremen (www.weber-steinhaus.com) and a member of the Hanseatic Bar of Bremen, Germany.
Lesley Jane has been teaching international, European and commercial law for over 20 years. She was appointed a Full Professor of International and European Economic law at the Leuphana University Lüneburg in 1996 (www.leuphana.de). Lesley Jane remains a guest professor within various university programs across Europe (Urbino, Bolzano, Strathclyde), including the International Space University (ISU).
Lesley Jane Smith acted as senior legal expert during the nineties within the major projects on constitutional and civil code reform in post-Soviet transformation states. She was subsequently appointed for several years as Rector to the Riga Graduate School of Law, University of Latvia (www.rgsl.edu.lv), a specialist school of European and international law established by Sweden to facilitate the country’s transition on regaining its independence and negotiating its accession to the EU. Lesley Jane has extensive professional and academic contacts to the main law schools and universities focusing on international space law across Asia, Europe and the Americas. Her own research interests in space law cover the areas of liability for commercial space activities and related issues of space debris, commercial issues of industrial and agency procurement, as well as regulatory aspects of GNSS and intellectual property issues relating to outer space activities. She has published widely on an extensive range of space-related legal questions and co-authored studies for the Academy, currently co-chairing a study group on cosmic debris. Lesley Jane latterly contributed to all three volumes of the Cologne Commentary on Space Law (CoCoSL), where she is the lead author on all aspects of liability for space activities and legal issues of Earth observation. Lesley Jane became a member of the International Institute of Space Law (IISL) in 2003, and was appointed as Board member at the Naples AGM in 2012. She became a corresponding member of the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) in 2010. She is a longstanding member of the European Center of Space Law (ECSL), which is hosted by ESA. In 2012 Lesley Jane was appointed Board member of the European section of Women in Aerospace (WIA-E). She lives in Bremen, is married and has three young adult children.
The second Vice President position is currently vacant.