Professor Andrew Robertson

Overview

Andrew Robertson holds the Edward Jenks Chair of Private Law at Melbourne Law School, where he is also Director of Studies in Private Law and Director of the Obligations Group. He joined the law school in 1999 after several years in commercial legal practice in Australia and England. He was appointed to a chair in law in 2006.

Professor Robertson’s research and teaching interests lie in the law and theory of obligations, particularly the law of contract, negligence and equitable estoppel. He has written many articles and book chapters on those topics and is co-author of Principles of Contract Law (7th ed, 2025) and Contract: Cases and Materials (15th ed, 2025). He has edited numerous collections of essays on the law of obligations and private law theory, including most recently Private Law and the State (Hart Publishing, 2024) and Mandatory and Default Rules in Contract and Commercial Law (Hart Publishing, 2026). He convenes the biennial Obligations Conference series, the next of which will be held in London in July 2027.

Professor Robertson’s research has been widely cited and discussed by courts, including the House of Lords, the UK Supreme Court, the English Court of Appeal, the Supreme Court of Canada, the Supreme Court of New Zealand, the Singapore Court of Appeal, the High Court of Australia, and the Courts of Appeal of New South Wales, Victoria, and Western Australia. He has been Walter S Owen Visiting Professor of Law at the University of British Columbia (2014), Visiting Professor at the National University of Singapore (2016), Conjoint Professor at Lund University in Sweden (2016–2019), and Visiting Fellow at Harvard Law School’s Project on the Foundations of Private Law (2019, 2022 and 2023).

Other School and University Responsibilities

Director of Studies in Private Law, Melbourne Law Masters