Professor Jason Varuhas

Overview

Dr Jason N E Varuhas (BA LLB (Hons) VUW, LLM UCL, PhD Cambridge) is a Professor of Law at the University of Melbourne, and Co-Director of Studies for the Government Law and Public and International Law programmes on the Melbourne Law Masters. He is also an Associate Fellow of the Centre for Public Law at the University of Cambridge. Professor Varuhas has previously held the positions of Junior Research Fellow at Christ’s College, University of Cambridge, Senior Lecturer at the University of New South Wales, Associate Professor at Melbourne Law School, and has been a Fox International Fellow at Yale University, Watts Visiting Fellow at the British Institute of International and Comparative Law, London, and Bye-Fellow of Downing College and Christ’s College, Cambridge. In 2019 he was the Robert S Campbell Visiting Fellow in Law at Magdalen College, Oxford, the Allan Myers Visitor at the University of Oxford Law Faculty, a Visiting Fellow at the Bonavero Institute for Human Rights, a Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge Faculty of Law, a Visiting Scholar at McGill University Faculty of Law, and a Visiting Fellow at Victoria University of Wellington Faculty of Law. He was formerly Judge’s Clerk to Justice Mark O’Regan, New Zealand Court of Appeal (now of the New Zealand Supreme Court), and is a Barrister and Solicitor of the High Court of New Zealand.

Professor Varuhas’s research and teaching interests cross the public law-private law divide; his specialisms lie in administrative law, the law of torts, the law of remedies, and the intersection of public and private law. He has published on topics in private and public law in leading international journals including sole-authored, full-length articles in the Cambridge Law Journal, Law Quarterly Review, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies and Modern Law Review. He has also published in leading edited collections, has presented at international conferences across the common law world, and authored policy reports, including a major policy paper for a leading UK think-tank, Judicial Capture of Political Accountability (London 2016). He has been consulted by government, think-tanks and the media, as well as on litigation. His scholarly work has been cited by the UK Supreme Court, English High Court, High Court of Australia, Federal Court of Australia, Victoria Court of Appeal, New Zealand Supreme Court, and New Zealand High Court.

Professor Varuhas is the author of Damages and Human Rights (Hart Publishing, 2016), a major work on damages for breaches of basic rights, which was awarded the UK Society of Legal Scholars Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship 2016 and the 2018 Inner Temple New Authors Book Prize, and has been shortlisted for the 2021 St Petersburg International Legal Forum Private Law Prize. The book has been cited by the UK Supreme Court in Lee-Hirons v. Secretary of State for Justice [2017] AC 52, the English High Court in Alseran v. Ministry of Defence [2018] 3 WLR 95, the Federal Court of Australia in its landmark damages decision in Wotton v. State of Queensland (No 5) [2016] FCA 1457, the Victoria Court of Appeal in Sell Your Gold Pty Ltd v. Australian Diamond Trading Corporation Pty Ltd [2018] VSCA 355, and the High Court of Australia in Lewis v. ACT [2020] HCA 26. The book stems from Professor Varuhas’s doctoral thesis for which he won the Yorke Prize at the University of Cambridge.

Professor Varuhas is the co-author of a leading text on English administrative law, Administrative Law (5th edn, Oxford University Press, 2017), and he contributes Book V on Damages under the Human Rights Act of McGregor on Damages (Justice James Edelman, 20th edn, Sweet and Maxwell, 2017). He has recently published five co-edited volumes: Public Law Adjudication in Common Law Systems (Hart Publishing, 2016); Equitable Compensation and Disgorgement of Profits (Hart Publishing, 2017); The Unity of Public Law? Doctrinal, Theoretical and Comparative Perspectives (Hart Publishing, 2018); Remedies for Breach of Privacy (Hart Publishing, 2018); The Frontiers of Public Law (Hart Publishing, 2019). Professor Varuhas is currently working on two books: Administrative Law (Hart Publishing, 2019), a critical introduction to administrative law; and The Law of Torts (6th edn, LexisNexis, 2020), the leading treatise on the Australian law of torts.

Professor Varuhas is a founder and co-convenor of the Public Law Conferences, a biennial series of major international conferences on public law, the most recent being held at Melbourne Law School in July 2018, for which he was the convenor. He has previously co-organised international workshops on equitable compensation and disgorgement of profits (UNSW 2015) and remedies for breach of privacy (Melbourne 2016).

Professor Varuhas has convened and lectured JD Remedies and JD Torts, and developed and taught three new Masters courses on the Melbourne MLM, Law and Public Administration (with Professor Rick Rawlings), Government Liability (with Professor Mark Aronson), and Public Law and Private Law (with Professor Cheryl Saunders). He serves on various committees in the Law School, including as Chair of the Scholarships Committee. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the Public Law Review.