Melbourne Criminal Law Research Forum
The aim of the Forum is to gather together in a collegial conversation about the various ways of making sense of criminal law in contemporary culture.
News & Events
Melbourne Law School has experts and researchers in all fields of criminal law - the jurisprudence of substantive, procedure, evidence law, as well as comparative, transnational and international criminal law.
Directors
Members

Raphael de Vietri
Research by members of the Forum extends across Australian, comparative and international criminal law, as well as on substantive, procedure and evidence laws of crime. The analyses are situated in relation to contemporary jurisprudence and theoretical debates, as well as law reform.
Research highlights from our members, include the following:
- Jianlin Chen and S.Y. Chong, ‘The Curse of the Lecherous Spiritual Charlatans: Law, Moral Panic and Newspaper Reports of Rape by Religious Fraud in Taiwan’ (2022) 17(1) University of Pennsylvania Asian Law Review 89-136
- Jianlin Chen, ‘The Hidden Sexual Offence: the (Mis)Information of Fraudulent Sex Criminalisation in Australian Universities’ (2020) 42(4) Sydney Law Review 425-467
- Heather Douglas and Tamara Walsh, 'Adolescent Family and Dating Violence and the Criminal Law Response' (2023) (38) Journal of Family Violence 287-299
- Heather Douglas, 'The use of fire and threats to burn in the context of domestic and family violence and coercive control' (2022) 35(1) Current Issues in Criminal Justice 27-47
- Heather Douglas and Robin Fitzgerald, Proving non-fatal strangulation in family violence cases: A case study on the criminalisation of family violence, (2021) 25(4) International Journal of Evidence and Proof , 350-370
- Jason Chin, Gary Edmond, and Andrew Roberts, Simply Unconvincing: The High Court on Probative Value and Reliability in the Uniform Evidence Law, (2022) 50(1) Federal Law Review, pp. 104-127, doi:10.1177/0067205X211066140
- Jeremy Gans, Mutilating Words, (2020) 44(2) Melbourne University Law Review, 725-763
- Jeremy Gans, Using true crime to teach evidence, in Yvonne Daly, Jeremy Gans and PJ Schwikkard (eds.) Teaching Evidence Law: Contemporary Trends and Innovations, Routledge (2020), doi: 10.4324/9780429286292
- Andrew Roberts and Megan Richardson, Privacy, Punishment and Private Law, in E Bant, Goudkamp, W Courtney, J Goudkamp, and J M Paterson (Eds.) Punishment and Private Law, Hart Publishing, (2021) 83-104, doi:10.5040/9781509939183.ch-004
- Peter Rush, (2021). Refractions of legal justice (Forensic Precinct, Series 2), in K Duncanson and E Henderson, (Eds.) Courthouse Architecture, Design and Social Justice, Routledge, (2021) 53-74, doi:10.4324/9780429059858-6
- Peter. D. Rush and Maria Elander, Working through the cinematography of international criminal justice: procedures of law and images of atrocity, (2018) 6(1) London Review of International Law, 17-43, doi:10.1093/lril/lry014
- Jamie Walvisch, Sentencing offenders with self-induced mental disorders: Towards a theory of meta-culpability, (2023) 30(1) Psychiatry, Psychology and Law 12-32
- Jamie Walvisch, Andrew Carroll and Tim Marsh, Sentencing and mental disorder: The evolution of the Verdins principles, strategic interdisciplinary advocacy and evidence-based reform, (2022) 29(5) Psychiatry, Psychology and Law 731-751
- Andrew Carroll, Jamie Walvisch and Tim Marsh, Personality disorder and forensic assessments: The benefits of ICD-11, (2022) Medicine, Science and the Law, 1-7
Many members of the Melbourne Criminal Law Research Forum are involved in law reform activities and projects. Some of their recent submissions and proposals are highlighted here.
We look forward to hosting working papers from our JD, MLM and our Graduate Researchers, as and when relevant to criminal law broadly understood.
Please contact Peter Rush or Heather Douglas if you would like your working paper to be hosted here.
Contact us by:
Email:
law-mclrf@unimelb.edu.au
or