Profile
Ailsa has been a member of chambers since 2019. Since then, Ailsa has developed an extensive record of defending and prosecuting matters of drug, dishonesty, violent, and sexual offending. She has also accumulated experience in complex and lengthy criminal prosecutions via her roles as disclosure junior and second junior counsel in multi-handed murder and historic sexual offence cases. She is a CPS Level 3 (General Crime) and RASSO prosecutor.
Ailsa additionally undertook an eight-month secondment to the CPS Extradition Unit between late 2025 and early 2026. Since her return to chambers, extradition has become a fast-growing area of her practice, in which she is pleased to accept instructions for both Requested Persons and Judicial Authorities/Requesting States. She regularly deals with applications for bail before the High Court, as well as extradition hearings in which issues under various provisions of the Extradition Act 2003, including human rights considerations, have been raised. She has also gained experience dealing with appellate extradition work before the High Court.
Ailsa also has an interest in public law work, having previously been listed on the Government Legal Department’s Junior Junior scheme. In that capacity, she was instructed (alongside Christopher Knight of 11KBW) to assist Sir Tom Winsor in his independent review into the departure of the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Dame Cressida Dick, in 2022. Additionally, during 2023-2024, Ailsa spent a period working for human rights and law reform NGO ‘JUSTICE’. As the organisation’s interim criminal lawyer, Ailsa led a working party chaired by Prof. Nick Hardwick CBE aimed at improving decision-making in prisons across areas including segregation, adjudications and categorisation.
Ailsa is also pleased to take on pro bono work via Advocate.
Expertise
- Judicial review
- Contempt
- Human rights
- Inquests and inquiries
- Police and prison law
- Criminal Bar Association
- Bar Human Rights Committee
- Young Fraud Lawyers’ Association
- CPS Advocate Panel (Level 3)
- Advocate
- 6KBW College Hill Management Committee
- 6KBW College Hill Equality and Diversity office
- Neurodiversity in Law (‘Champion’)
- Barristers with Lived Experience of Mental Illness
Australian Academy of Law Inaugural Essay Prize – 2015
- The Little Book of Market Manipulation (2019, Waterside Press), co-authored with Gregory Durston.
- ‘Rights to Abortion in 2018: Sensing the Winds of Change?’, ILA Reporter, February 2018 (Please find link here).
- ‘Suspicion and the Information Sharing Regime’, Money Laundering: Information Sharing and the Extended Moratorium Period – Briefing Papers (2017, White Collar Crime Centre).
- ‘Public Contract Debarment and the Corporate Offence of Failure to Prevent’ in Anita Clifford & Natasha Reurts (eds) Briefing Papers on the Corporate Offence of Failure to Prevent Facilitation of Tax Evasion: Thoughts on Scope and Effect in the UK (2017, White Collar Crime Centre).
- ‘How Should Academia, the Practising Profession and the Courts Assist Each Other in the Education of Australian Lawyers?’ (2016) 90(5) Australian Law Journal 355-360.
- ‘Revoking Citizenship of Foreign Fighters: Implications for the Jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court’ (Author) – Guest Post on Opinio Juris, 15 June 2015 (Please see link here).
- ‘Queensland’s Frontier Killing Times – Facing up to Genocide’ (Co-author with Scott McDougall and Hannah Baldry) – Paper presented at the World Indigenous Legal Conference, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, 25 June 2014, and published at (2015) 15(1) QUT Law Review 92-113.
- LLB/BA (Spanish/Peace & Conflict Studies), University of Queensland, Australia
- GDLP, Australian National University
- LLM (International Law) (1st), University of Cambridge
- BTT, BPP Law School
To view Ailsa McKeon’s Privacy Notice, please click here.
Recognition
