Professor Andrew Roberts

Overview

Andrew Roberts joined Melbourne Law School in 2011. Previously, he held appointments at the Universities of Warwick and Leeds, as well as visiting positions in the Law School at the University of New South Wales and the Department of Political Science, Goethe University, Frankfurt.

Andrew has diverse research interests. His work has been published in legal, psychological science, and political theory journals, including the Modern Law Review, Law and Social Inquiry, Federal Law Review, European Journal of Political Theory, and Applied Cognitive Psychology.

He has a long-standing interest in criminal evidence and procedure. He is a co-author of Uniform Evidence, 4th edition, (2025: Thomson Reuters), and co-editor of a collection of essays on Australian Uniform Evidence Law: Critical Perspectives on the Uniform Evidence Law (2017: Federation Press). He has published widely on problems associated with expert evidence, eyewitness identification, and witness testimony. His work in these fields has been cited by appellate courts in various jurisdictions, including the High Court of Australia, the Supreme Court of Canada, New Zealand Court of Appeal, and Courts of Appeal in Victoria, South Australia and Queensland.

Much of Andrew’s writing on the law of evidence is informed by the work cognitive scientists, with whom he has engaged in various collaborative projects. He is currently a Chief Investigator (with Dr Celine van Golde, University of Sydney and Professor Kim Wade, University of Warwick) on an Australian Research Council funded project concerned with use of Body Worn Cameras to record complainants’ statements when the police attend incidents of Domestic and Family Violence. The project will consist of a series of experiments that examine how a range of variables affect assessment of a complainant’s credibility. The project will run from 2024-2026.

Andrew has also pursued interests in republican political theory and privacy. He is author of Privacy in the Republic (Routledge, 2022) which explains why privacy ought to be considered by republicans to be a collective good that, in various ways, protects citizens from domination. In subsequent writing, he has considered how, in the context of increasing use of intrusive technology in the criminal justice system, this way of thinking about privacy and its value might usefully shape the development of procedural law and policy. He has written on the law relating to powers to take and retain DNA, bulk communications data retention schemes, and the justification in private law for the award of exemplary damages for violation of privacy. He is co-editor of Privacy, Technology, and the Criminal Process (2023: Routledge), a collection of essays that explore the impact on privacy of the use of technology in the criminal justice system.