Hilary Evans Cameron

Areas of Expertise

• Fact-Finding
• Decision-Making
• Credibility Assessment
• Lie Detection
• Refugee Law

Hilary Evans Cameron is an Associate Professor at the Lincoln Alexander School of Law, in Toronto, Canada. A former litigator who represented refugee claimants for a decade, she holds a doctorate in refugee law from the University of Toronto. 

Much of Prof. Evans Cameron’s research centres on fact-finding, with a focus on deception judgments in refugee status rejections. She explores questions at the intersection of law and psychology: How do decision-makers decide that a refugee claimant is lying? What inferences do they rely on to justify these conclusions? What assumptions underlie these inferences, and how well-founded are these assumptions? Her work in legal logics explores the principles that guide fact-finding: What structures constrain the drawing of factual conclusions from evidence, and what normative principles should guide the development of these structures? Beyond this, Prof. Evans Cameron has written about administrative law, pedagogy, experimental methodologies, pseudoscience, and the coming of AI to refugee hearings.

Prof. Evans Cameron is the author of many publications, including a book about the law of fact-finding in refugee status decision-making (Refugee Law’s Fact-finding Crisis: Truth, Risk, and the Wrong Mistake, Cambridge 2018). Her work is cited widely within the academy and by decision-makers and judges in Canada and internationally. She regularly gives lectures and training sessions to audiences around the world.

Prof. Evans Cameron is a member of the Bridging Divides research team.