Professor Robert Burrell

Phone number +61 3 8344 3537 Email robert.burrell@unimelb.edu.au Find an Expert Find an Expert

Overview

Robert is a Professor of Law at the University of Melbourne. Robert also holds the Professorship of Intellectual Property and Information Technology Law at the University of Oxford. Robert’s previous academic positions include posts at the Australian National University and King’s College London. He has been a Herbert Smith Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge and Visiting Professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York.

Robert teaches and researches across all areas of intellectual property law. He is the author, with Allison Coleman, of Copyright Exceptions: The Digital Impact (Cambridge University Press, 2005) and, with Michael Handler, of Australian Trade Mark Law (Oxford University Press, 2010; 2nd ed. 2016). His most recent work includes an investigation of the role of rewards as an alternative to the patent system in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and an interdisciplinary project with a team of psychologists that tests trade mark law’s assumptions about consumers.

His work has been cited by the High Court of Australia, the Federal Court of Australia, the Supreme Court of New Zealand, the Court of Appeal of England and Wales and in an Opinion of an Advocate General to the European Court of Justice.

Outside of academia, Robert has spent many years working as a consultant to boutique Australian firms and, in particular, has substantial experience in litigation before the Australian Trade Marks Office.