Celestine Greenwood was called to the Bar of England and Wales in 1991, and for twenty years built a practice at the Liverpool Bar in child protection and domestic violence cases that placed her consistently among the most sought-after junior counsel in the North West — acting for local authorities, parents and children alike in the most serious cases, including shaken baby, fabricated illness and baby death matters.

In 2011, having reached the pinnacle of junior practice, she chose a different path: a decade of international human rights work that took her to Tajikistan, the Pacific region, Afghanistan, India and the United States. She worked with abused girls on access to justice in Central Asia, led human rights training programmes for NGOs, parliamentarians and High Court judges across the Pacific, and served on USAID’s world’s largest women’s empowerment project in Afghanistan.

In Washington D.C. she completed an LLM in International Human Rights and Gender at American University Washington College of Law — graduating with the Outstanding Graduate Award, the Ed Bou Award (highest GPA among foreign-born LLM students) and the Solf Award (highest overall LLM GPA) — and joined the teaching staff as an Adjunct Professor.

“Privileged to have served the people of Liverpool as a barrister in child protection work, and to have served overseas as a legal and development specialist — now harnessing all these experiences in PhD research that aims to reimagine the child protection legal system to improve outcomes for children and families.”

Since returning to UK practice at Exchange Chambers in 2020, she has appeared twice before the Court of Appeal in significant public law children cases and has rapidly re-established herself as a leading voice in the family Bar. Her current doctoral thesis — Because childhood lasts a lifetime — seeks to leverage data, embed child rights and develop problem-solving approaches to reimagine the child protection legal system in England and Wales.

Celestine maintains deep international connections: she continues to contribute to the War Crimes Research Project at American University Washington College of Law, the Center for Rule of Law and Good Governance, and the Free Syrian Lawyers Association. She has recently assumed responsibility for the Girls Human Rights Hub Young Experts Programme at the University of Cambridge, and regularly speaks and writes on the intersection of poverty, domestic abuse, and the family justice system.