Legal Research

Australian companies and consumers routinely make use of credit to finance their business activities and purchases of homes and household items, respectively. These credit arrangements can take a wide variety of legal forms, ranging from tiny so-called "payday loans" taken out by consumers to huge multi-lender loans to companies.

This topic will provide an opportunity for students to engage with selected aspects of contemporary finance transactions and recent legal developments relating to corporate and consumer finance. Students will be able to undertake a substantial research paper on topics such as the Personal Property Securities Act 2009 (Cth) (which regulates mortgages, charges and other security interests over personal property, and thus plays a crucial role in secured lending), different types of commercial entities (including new purposed-based companies), potentially harmful consumer financial products (including payday loans and buy-now-pay later), and securitisation (which is an important - and controversial - alternative to conventional fund-raising by companies, in particular banks and other lenders).

As community understanding and concern about the potential serious long-term health impacts of concussion, and of repeated sub-concussive head knocks, grow, sporting bodies in Australia and internationally are having to address a range of difficult questions that go to the heart of how a number of our most popular (and lucrative) sports are played. To what extent should rules be modified to reduce risk to players? What policies and protocols should be implemented to protect the health and wellbeing of those who suffer head knocks during games or in training? How much weight should be given to community enjoyment of ‘contact sports’, and to calls to maintain, across different sports, the ‘fabric of the game’? And who is best placed to make these kinds of decisions – sporting bodies; players’ associations; legislatures; regulators; courts; or some combination of these?

While major sporting bodies and players’ associations are taking head knocks increasingly seriously out of concern for the long-term health and wellbeing of participants, there is little doubt that personal injury litigation (both individual and class actions) and the fear of legal liability more broadly, are informing the thinking and decision-making of sporting administrators. Classes will focus primarily on Australian Rules Football / the Australian Football League, including examining personal injury litigation against the AFL, clubs and club doctors, though discussion will not be limited to AFL.

This topic offers students the opportunity to explore a range of complex legal issues in this field – across different sports; across different levels of sport (eg elite, lower-level professional, amateur, junior, school); across nationally and internationally regulated sports; or across different substantive areas of law or different kinds of legal proceedings. This is a rapidly evolving landscape, offering students the opportunity to engage with, and potentially contribute to, important current and future developments.

Media law (privacy, defamation, obscenity, vilification) is a highly topical and shifting landscape, attempting to respond to new technologies, social, political and cultural change, as well as balance freedom of expression against interests of dignity, reputation, community cohesion, and morality. Over the last couple of years, many areas of media law in Australia have been significantly reformed. In defamation law, an element of serious harm and new defences of public interest and internet intermediaries were introduced. The #MeToo movement also led to an expansion of the defence of absolute privilege to include those who report crimes to police.

In the area of privacy, 2024 witnessed the Victorian County Court declaring a new common law tort of privacy and Federal Parliament simultaneously enacting a cause of action for serious invasion of privacy. Vilification laws in Victoria were strengthened in early 2025 and extended to protect attributes of sex, sex characteristics, gender, and disability. In the United States, obscenity laws have been making a comeback in regulating abortion. In addition, new technologies (such as generative AI and deepfake images) pose unique challenges for existing doctrines. This Legal Research Stream examines pressing issues in media law, their connection with historical trends and challenges, and invites essays that investigate how best to weigh interests of expression and creativity against individual and collective harms.

Democratic crisis has become a major concern worldwide, with law often weaponised by political leaders to attack and undermine democratic institutions, elections, and civil society. However, if constitutional law can be used to erode a democratic system, can it also be used to make it more resilient? This research stream will focus on two sides of the same coin: (i) the specific ways constitutional law has been abused to undermine and hollow out democracy (‘autocratic legalism’); and (ii) the remarkable range of new constitutional design ideas to make democracies more resilient, which has emerged from scholars and states across the Global North and Global South over the past five years (‘new wave constitutional design’).

This stream will sharpen students’ capacity to understand law as a tool of both authoritarian and democratic governance. Through a broad comparative approach in the seminars, students will build skills in critically assessing the strengths, weaknesses, and potential of different constitutional designs, specific institutions, and novel institutional designs as ways of maintaining a robust democratic system. Students will enjoy broad flexibility regarding what states, institutions and design ideas they would like to research. They will also enjoy broad latitude regarding what overall approach they would like to take, including socio-legal, comparative, conceptual, theoretical, and legal-historical approaches.

International economic law and its institutions are paradigmatic embodiments of transnational law and governance.  Yet they are subject to an array of contemporary challenges and pressures. After decades of deepening levels of multilateral trade cooperation, we are now witnessing the sudden emergence of dangerous levels of unilateralism and protectionism.  In the United States, the Trump Administration’s turn to destabilising tariffs in the guise of its “America First” policies have provoked swift retaliation by both strategic competitors (China) and allies (Canada and the European Union).  Australia too has been the subject of unprecedented unilateral tariffs imposed by China during the COVID-19 pandemic.  The World Trade Organization is increasingly unable to manage these pressures and violations, with its vaunted dispute settlement system now also rapidly approaching a dangerous possibility of stasis.  International investment law is no less conflicted. Constructed against a historical contingency of state hostility to foreign investors (in the post-colonial period), bilateral and regional investment treaties have prioritised protection of foreign investment without adequate respect for the regulatory autonomy and constitutional obligations of host states.  This structural imbalance was vividly illustrated by the claim for damages launched by Philip Morris against Australia on the basis that Australia’s plain packaging laws for cigarette products breached the Hong Kong – Australia Bilateral Investment Treaty.  Investor-state arbitration and protection standards in investment treaties sit at the apex of state dissatisfaction, with important strategic actors like the European Union advancing judicial reform possibilities.

In the seminars of this JD topic of Legal Research, we will explore this unsettled terrain in two key parts.  First, we will examine the historical justifications, norms and goals pursued by key parts of international economic law in the post-Second World War period, especially in cross-border trade (in the form of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade 1947 and later the World Trade Organization 1993) and foreign investment (through bilateral investment treaties).  Second, we will seek to identify the political economy factors driving contemporary state reassessment/recalibration of levels of commitment to those legal structures and institutions.  Using those analytical start points, students will have a strong foundation to build a research topic in this dynamic and contested field.

This topic will explore Australian legal history and historiography, with a particular focus on continuity and change in the High Court of Australia.

Students in this stream will explore together the reasons behind the relatively limited production of Australian legal histories through the lens of the High Court; the ‘defining’ moments in the Court’s history; and current developments in judicial biography and in intellectual history. The stream will then move to examine some of the primary and secondary sources available to the legal historian. Students are encouraged in their research projects to explore aspects of High Court history, or the writing of High Court history, in any period from the establishment of the Griffith Court to the Gleeson Court. This includes (but is not limited to) institutional history, politico-legal history, intellectual history, and examinations of doctrinal development or judicial philosophy over time. Students will also be encouraged to consider researching within wider contexts so as to contemplate the interaction of the High Court with other arms of government, with the profession, with academia, and with the community more generally.

This topic will examine two areas of global significance to labour law. The first is international trade. As a key aspect of globalisation, economic integration of national economies through trade liberalisation (‘free trade’), is profoundly shaping the world of work through job and industry restructuring; shifts in the balance of power between employers and workers; and impacts on working conditions. The second is climate change. As an existential crisis for humanity, climate change will have, according to the International Labour Organisation, an impact on the world of work ‘akin to an Industrial Revolution’. The course will integrate these two areas through an examination of the climate-trade-labour nexus where international trade is a key contributor of climate change and potentially a significant lever for climate action.

The subject has three overarching questions:

• What is the significance of labour law in addressing the global challenges of international trade and climate change?
• To what extent do the normative assumptions and theoretical underpinnings of labour law need to be re-assessed and re-cast to help address these challenges?
• To what extent are the established regulatory means of labour law adequate to address these challenges?

A thread running through these questions is whether continuous economic growth (including through international trade) and capitalism are compatible with a climate-safe economy.

What happens when legal outsiders, including activists, everyday people and other nonlegal actors, take up law – as a genre – to dissent against existing legal arrangements and imagine alternative possibilities? Is it possible for people who lack the authority to speak the law to bring about legal change by simply acting as if the law could be otherwise in the here and now? This research stream will provide an opportunity for students to explore the phenomenon of what Cohen and Morgan (2023) have called ‘prefigurative legality’ – that is, the use of the language and form of law to plant the seeds of alternative legal futures in the soil of the present. Examples include the establishment of the Aboriginal tent embassy in 1972 both to critique and to reimagine legal relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in Australia; critical judgment projects, which involve rewriting existing judgments from feminist, queer and other perspectives to consider what the law might look like outside of dominant power structures; and ‘people’s tribunals’, which are civil society initiatives that assert a ‘popular jurisdiction’ to demonstrate the alternative ways international law could respond (or could have responded) to topics ranging from the Vietnam and Iraq wars to the rights of nature. For their research projects, students will be invited to think critically about the legal problems and possibilities involved in such efforts through a case study of their choosing.

Southeast Asia is a place of extraordinary ethnic, religious and political diversity and has undergone dramatic change over the last thirty years. As champions of conservative authoritarianism and reformist liberal democratic reform compete for political power they exploit this diversity, with issues of law, human rights and identity constantly at the heart of public debate. This topic explores major constitutional and legal controversies in Southeast Asia, focusing on their social, political and cultural contexts and how human rights are articulated in this complex region, one that will be of crucial economic and strategic importance for Australia in the coming decades.

Students in this topic can work on any one or more of the states of Southeast Asia, including, for example, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Brunei, Timor Leste, the Philippines, etc. There is a very wide range of issues related to law and rights in the region students can chose to investigate, including, for example, the death penalty, the application of shari’a, racial laws, self-determination, women’s rights, access to justice, disability, treatment of LGBTQI people, the criminal process, constitutional rights, judicial interpretation of rights, freedom of expression and dissent, the right of association, NGOs and trade unions, and Internet rights, to name just a few. There is also flexibility about the type of research project that may be undertaken, including historical, socio-legal, theoretical or doctrinal approaches, among others.

Prior knowledge of Southeast Asia is not necessary.

This topic gives you the opportunity to explore legal personhood and the question concerning "what is it to be a legal person?"  You will be expected to engage with some theoretical analysis of the status or condition of legal personality, but you are also encouraged to develop a topic and research questions attuned to your own interests. These maybe in relation to several (possibly cross-disciplinary) contexts, including philosophical, aesthetic and historical ones, as well as more confined debates about legal doctrines and principles in various fields of law and regulatory policy, such as those involving the nature and limits of the individual human condition, the nature of personhood (if any) accorded to members of marginalised groups in society, the nature of human organisation(s), criminal responsibility, rights of nature, animal welfare, robotics and artificial intelligence etc.

This topic will offer you the opportunity to explore and evaluate legal responses to the fact of diversity and difference amongst citizens. 
We will explore the shortcomings of traditional liberal state responses to difference and diversity (including toleration, exemptions and secularism) and consider whether different responses, including the following, hold promise:

• recognition - legal recognition of the status or value of particular communities or identities
• multiculturalism- providing exemptions, funding for arts, and other supports to enable cultural groups to thrive
• self-government - offering groups autonomy over their own affairs within the boundaries of the state
• fraternity - a largely forgotten ideal of developing emotional bonds and a sense of togetherness between citizens.

This is not an exhaustive list of possible state responses to difference and students will have the opportunity to nominate further responses for us to explore as a class.

Students will research and write a paper on the continuing significance of a historically important prosecution and trial for ‘political crimes’ such as treason, sedition, rebellion, agitation, heresy, blasphemy and other forms of dissent. After studying examples of this genre of legal history writing and a selection of primary source materials, students will be assisted in selecting their own topic.

Students already acquainted with historical research methods will be able to refine their skills. There is, however, no expectation of prior historical training, and students who are new to the study of history will be given guidance to develop an appropriate research methodology to fit their chosen topic. The research paper should include at least two of the following three aspects (unless permission for a variation has been granted): (i) analysis of trial records and contemporaneous documentation such as reports in the mass media, pamphlets and other polemical materials; (ii) examples of the way the trial has been mythologised and reinterpreted, for example through subsequent treatment in elite or popular culture or within politico-legal discourse; (iii) evaluation of changing ‘serious’ or academic analysis by historians and legal scholars and how and why scholarly interpretations have changed over time.

A small selection of some of the many excellent research papers written by JD students who have previously taken this subject can be found in Legal History Matters: From Magna Carta to the Clinton Impeachment, edited by Amanda Whiting and Ann O’Connell (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2020) – e-book held in the University Library.

Statelessness, or the lack of nationality of any country, is a serious but little-understood human rights issue affecting millions of people around the world. Statelessness also links to many other contemporary issues, including displacement and migration, security and development, conflict, and climate change. This research stream invites you to critically engage with the persistent tension that arises between State sovereignty and every person’s right to a nationality, and to consider whether international law succeeds in balancing these competing demands.

Two seminars will lay the foundations for questions that you may wish to explore through your research. The first seminar will examine the international legal framework relating to the right to a nationality and statelessness, including issues and debates relating to key legal definitions, concepts, and interpretation of legal norms. The second seminar will highlight current issues of statelessness through a series of case studies relating to armed conflict, terrorism, and climate change to probe the extent to which international law is equipped to address these modern manifestations of statelessness.

This topic examines contemporary issues in property law not covered in the compulsory curriculum. In 2026, the topic will focus on the interfaces of property law and climate change; the distributional effects of property law and the contemporary politics of housing; and lawful limitations on proprietary rights, including strata title, freehold covenants, and planning law. Students will design a sociolegal research project around an approved case study, drawing upon on relevant case law, legislation and scholarship.

Rapid technological advances are transforming contemporary healthcare, often outpacing the ability of existing legal frameworks to safeguard patients and health research participants from harm. This research stream invites students to examine the intersection between emerging health technologies and the law, with a focus on current regulatory challenges in Australia.

Technologies considered may include AI-based diagnostics, decision-support tools and medical scribes, clinical and research genomics, mobile health applications, 3D bioprinting and related innovations. Through case studies and discussion, students will explore how these technologies shape—and strain—the evolving legal landscape.

Students may choose to concentrate their research on one or more technologies, analysing their implications for privacy, consent, liability and other key issues. The subject engages a range of legal frameworks, including tort law, medical device and tissue regulation, privacy and data protection, and consumer protection law.

Prior completion of LAWS50064 Employment Law is strongly recommended.

Empirical research indicates that many workers experience abusive behaviours at work. This behaviour might be conceptualised by employment law as discrimination, sexual and other forms of harassment, vilification or racial hatred, or workplace bullying. Since the 1970s, Australian employment law has developed to provide multiple avenues through which victim-survivors can seek redress, as well as avenues that attempt to proactively bring about systemic change within workplaces. Yet the legal provisions that do exist are inadequate.

This topic uses evaluative criteria of equality and justice to examine key legal changes in Australia since the 1970s designed to address the problem of abusive behaviour in paid work relations.

Since the 1980s feminist scholars, across jurisdictions, have challenged the content and operation of laws that deny all people equality of status and protection. Importantly, they also disrupted the claim that equality before the law was an unequivocal certainty, and through their work instantiated a challenge to legal knowledge itself. In Feminist Jurisprudence, we will investigate and trace some of these diverse resources and sources of feminist thought.

The seminar component of the elective will take the form of a reading group. We will engage in close contextual interpretation and conversation about ground-breaking texts, to explore what methods the authors initiated for critique and challenge to legal thought and action. The objective is to reinvigorate research around contemporary legal questions and problems that draw from these resources. Indicative texts for the reading group in 2022  are: Carol Smart Feminism and the Power of Law (1989); Kimberlé Crenshaw ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex’ (1989); Margaret Thornton The Liberal Promise: Anti-Discrimination Legislation in Australia (1990); Judith Butler Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of identity(1990); Moira Gatens Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power, and Corporeality (1996); Janet Halley Split Decisions How and Why to Take a Break From Feminism (2006); Aileen Moreton-Robinson  ‘Towards an Australian Indigenous Women’s Standpoint Theory: A Methodological Tool’ (2014). For their projects, students will be invited to think with one of the discussed texts to interrogate a current jurisprudential or legal problem of their choice (for example, in the areas of reproductive rights; sexual harassment and #MeToo; family law and family violence; discrimination law;  employment law; status of persons before the law; although students are encouraged to apply the techniques discussed in the class to any area of law).

International economic law and its institutions are paradigmatic embodiments of transnational law and governance.  Yet they are subject to an array of contemporary challenges and pressures. After decades of deepening levels of multilateral trade cooperation, we are now witnessing the sudden emergence of dangerous levels of unilateralism and protectionism.  In the United States, the Trump Administration’s turn to destabilising tariffs in the guise of its “America First” policies have provoked swift retaliation by both strategic competitors (China) and allies (Canada and the European Union).  Australia too has been the subject of unprecedented unilateral tariffs imposed by China during the COVID-19 pandemic.  The World Trade Organization is increasingly unable to manage these pressures and violations, with its vaunted dispute settlement system now also rapidly approaching a dangerous possibility of stasis.  International investment law is no less conflicted. Constructed against a historical contingency of state hostility to foreign investors (in the post-colonial period), bilateral and regional investment treaties have prioritised protection of foreign investment without adequate respect for the regulatory autonomy and constitutional obligations of host states.  This structural imbalance was vividly illustrated by the claim for damages launched by Philip Morris against Australia on the basis that Australia’s plain packaging laws for cigarette products breached the Hong Kong – Australia Bilateral Investment Treaty.  Investor-state arbitration and protection standards in investment treaties sit at the apex of state dissatisfaction, with important strategic actors like the European Union advancing judicial reform possibilities.

In the seminars of this JD topic of Legal Research, we will explore this unsettled terrain in two key parts.  First, we will examine the historical justifications, norms and goals pursued by key parts of international economic law in the post-Second World War period, especially in cross-border trade (in the form of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade 1947 and later the World Trade Organization 1993) and foreign investment (through bilateral investment treaties).  Second, we will seek to identify the political economy factors driving contemporary state reassessment/recalibration of levels of commitment to those legal structures and institutions.  Using those analytical start points, students will have a strong foundation to build a research topic in this dynamic and contested field.

Normative anthropocentrism, or the view that human beings are the only bearers of non-derivative value, is a fundamental assumption of liberal constitutional systems. Broadly speaking, liberal constitutions organise political power to advance human well-being and value non-human nature insofar as it is conducive to human well-being. By contrast, a green normative perspective values non-human nature for its own sake and views human nature-relationships holistically in terms of an interdependent partnership.

In this topic, students will critically evaluate how normative anthropocentrism features in Australian constitutional reasoning and investigate non-anthropocentric alternatives by producing green constitutional judgments. Research essays will contain two components: (1) a component re-writing a High Court constitutional law decision taught in the core curriculum from a green normative perspective, and (2) a component reflecting on the re-written judgment.

The topic is supported by a Melbourne Biodiversity Institute seed funding grant and forms part of a wider research project on greening Australian constitutional democracy, which focuses on pathways for incremental norm change, including through legal education and pedagogy. Participating students will contribute to project outputs and help develop teaching materials and resources.

This topic will explore Australian legal history and historiography, with a particular focus on continuity and change in the High Court of Australia.

Students in this topic will explore together the reasons behind the relatively limited production of Australian legal histories through the lens of the High Court; the ‘defining’ moments in the Court’s history; and current developments in judicial biography and in intellectual history. The topic will then move to examine some of the primary and secondary sources available to the legal historian. Students are encouraged in their research projects to explore aspects of High Court history, or the writing of High Court history, in any period from the establishment of the Griffith Court to the Gleeson Court. This includes (but is not limited to) institutional history, politico-legal history, intellectual history, and examinations of doctrinal development or judicial philosophy over time. Students will also be encouraged to consider researching within wider contexts so as to contemplate the interaction of the High Court with other arms of government, with the profession, with academia, and with the community more generally.

The COVID-19 pandemic has graphically demonstrated both the global nature of health, and the critical importance of international cooperation for global health. The ways in which the pandemic, and responses to it, have played out revealed major gaps and weaknesses in the international legal frameworks for preventing and controlling the international spread of disease that were in place when COVID-19 emerged. Taking the major lessons of the COVID-19 experience on board, the international community has embarked on an ambitious program of international lawmaking through the World Health Organization (WHO). This has included amendments to the International Health Regulations (2005) and a new pandemic treaty.

This topic will be focused specifically on these international lawmaking developments. It will offer students the opportunity to engage with them at a range of different levels, including examining and exploring (just by way of example): specific changes / new rules agreed to (or that have been proposed, but that governments have not agreed to); different perspectives and priorities of Global South and Global North countries, particularly with respect to how a broadly agreed commitment to greater global equity should be operationalised; what kinds of institutional mechanisms might be needed for the new frameworks to prove effective in practice, including with respect to implementation and compliance; the appropriate role/s of the WHO in this area of international law; and what this international lawmaking might reveal about the possibilities and the limits of international law in global health cooperation, and more broadly.

In this topic, we examine the complex challenges posed by the regulation of civil liberties in a democracy. The seminars will consider a number of current themes, issues and perspectives in Australia including:

• Democracy and civil liberties,
• Legal protection of liberty and democracy.

The topic will provide the opportunity for students to engage in a critical appraisal of law, liberty and democracy through a research topic of their own choice. The seminar will adopt an interdisciplinary approach drawing upon literature in political philosophy, political science and the law. We will consider competing conceptions of liberty, equality and democracy, which will then be used to ground a critique of law’s regulation of civil liberties.

This topic addresses the theory and practice of legal pluralism in states in which multiple cultural, ethnic, religious and Indigenous communities live together. In addition to thinking through theories of legal and cultural pluralism, including multiculturalism, we will consider the application of ideas drawn from transnational and international law, including private international law methods, treaties, shared sovereignty, devolution and self-government. Students can elect to focus on theories or on primary materials, or can design a project that encompasses both.

Over the course of the twentieth century, a select group of rich nations, including Australia, achieved a golden age of increasing social product and declining inequality (Stiglitz, 2024; Piketty 2014, 2021). This was in part the product of the ideal of redistributive taxation, which was primarily realised through the introduction and expansion of the progressive income tax. For nearly the past half-century, these same nations have abandoned or weakened their commitment to the goal of redistributive taxation and the role of the progressive income tax and other redistributive taxes, with a consequent growth in income and wealth inequality.

This topic explores the ways in which political theorists, economists and lawyers conceive of, assess and contribute to the role of taxation in shaping social and economic outcomes. It offers participants the opportunity to explore the role of tax law and policy as a tool to address inequality and achieve economic justice.