Dr Brad Jessup

Overview

Brad Jessup is an environment expert at The University of Melbourne. He is a program director of the Centre for Resources, Energy and Environmental Law and has a particular interest in interdisciplinary scholarship that traverses areas of law, environment, society and policy. He teaches torts and environmental and experiential law subjects, including the innovative subject Sustainability Business Clinic. Brad joined Melbourne Law School in 2012 from the Australian National University, where he had been teaching and researching within the ANU College of Law since 2007. Previously, Brad worked as a planning and environmental lawyer within Herbert Smith Freehills.

Brad Jessup is a human geographer and an environmental and planning lawyer who offers global, national, comparative and local perspectives in his research. Brad's research and teaching cross disciplines in the tradition of legal geography and draw on political theories, his expert knowledge of environmental law processes, and case study examples of law in society. Brad is especially interested in the law and regulation of place, the human and environmental experience of harm, and the role of the law, lawyers, society and policy in responding to risk and threats of harm.

Over recent years, Brad has supervised research students using qualitative research methods and on topics including researching community wind farms, landowner protests to native vegetation laws, environmental citizenship, supports for people with a disability, environmental duties of care, gene technology regulation, and the protection of whales under federal laws.

With Professor Kim Rubenstein, Brad is the editor of a collection of essays published by Cambridge University Press in 2012. The collection, Environmental Discourses in Public and International Law, brings together international legal and humanities scholars to analyse the dominant ways of knowing, constructing and presenting information about global environmental 'problems' and 'solutions' and the law.

Brad has been a visiting scholar with Oxford University's Faculty of Law and Wolfson College, with the Faculty of Laws at UCL, and at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was affiliated with the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment. While based in North America, Brad undertook funded research for the Energy Pipelines Cooperative Research Centre. This research involved comparing the land use planning and safety aspects of pipeline regulation on the urban fringe across jurisdictions. He has received funding from The University of Melbourne to research community values in planning law, exploring intersections between queerness, human rights and socio-economic disadvantage with Victoria's planning and environmental lawscape. Brad has also undertaken detailed research on Australian marine protected areas, Vietnam’s environmental laws, and the planning law conflict around wind farms and nuclear waste.

Brad completed his PhD with the Australian National University in 2019, winning the Australian Legal Research Awards’ best thesis prize. His thesis, on the topic of concepts of justice in Australian environmental law, critiqued the law from theoretical, empirical and ethnographic perspectives. Brad graduated with first-class Honours in science and law from Monash University where he was an Assistant Editor of the Monash University Law Review. Brad has a Masters degree in geography from the University of Cambridge, where he studied on a Commonwealth Scholarship.

Brad is admitted to practise law. He worked in a commercial legal practice from 2001 to 2006. During that time, he advised clients in long-running legal disputes and discrete legal matters concerning environmental impact assessment, town planning, property and land access, pollution, and environmental torts.