Professor Mallinder's research interests relate to the intersections of law and peace. She has a longstanding and internationally recognised expertise in amnesty laws, on which she has written extensively. She has also created the Amnesties, Conflict and Peace Database. She is currently continuing this work as part of the Peace and Conflict Resolution Evidence Platform, led by the University of Edinburgh and funded by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship.

Prof Mallinder is also co-editing The Elgar Concise Encyclopedia on Law and Peace (with L. Dempster and R. Killean, due for completion in 2025).

Her previous work has included a co-authored a monograph on 'Lawyers in Conflict and Transition' (CUP 2022) with K. McEvoy and A. Bryson, which drew on qualitative fieldwork in six transitional sites funded by the ESRC.

She has also for many years worked on dealing with the past in Northern Ireland with colleagues from the Committee on the Administration of Justice and QUB School of Law. An impact case study based on this work was ranked at 4* in REF2021.

Professor Mallinder's teaching focuses on international human rights law, human rights practice, constitutional law, and transitional justice.

Professor Mallinder is a Member of the Royal Irish Academy, a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

She has been awarded the British Society of Criminology Book Prize (jointly awarded) and the Hart Socio-Legal Studies Association Early Career Prize.

In addition, as part of the PeaceRep team, she jointly received the 2023 RSE Mary Somerville Medal, which recognizes exceptional achievement in teamwork and collaborative endeavour and she was appointed as the 2024 Pozen Professor of Human Rights at the University of Chicago. This is a visiting professor appointment that is awarded annually to 'distinguished human rights scholars or practitioners'.

She is also a member of the Institute for Integrated Transitions Law and Peace Practice Group,  and the ESRC and AHRC Peer Review Colleges. From 2014-2022, she served on the Royal Irish Academy's Ethical, Political, Legal, and Philosophical Committee. In addition, she was Chair of the Committee on the Administration of Justice, a human rights non-governmental organisation based in Belfast, Northern Ireland from (2015-2020); Vice-Chair in 2013-2015 and 2020-2024. She continues to be a board member.

Louise Mallinder is Professor in the School Law at Queen's University Belfast, appointed in 2018 and the Interim Director of the Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice.

She was previously a Professor of Human Rights and International Law at the Transitional Justice Institute, Ulster University. She holds a PhD, an LLM in human rights law, and BA in economic and social history and politics, all from Queen's University Belfast. She also has a Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education Practice from Ulster University and Level 5 Award in Leadership and Management from the Institute of Leadership and Management. From 2019-2022, she was the Athena Swan Champion for the QUB School of Law.